#SamuelBeckett #Nazis #history #bookstodon
"'What a Schererei': Beckett’s view of Nazi Germany
The University of Bern, together with the University of Reading, is publishing Samuel Beckett’s *German Diaries* for the first time. In these diaries from 1936/37, the Irish writer describes his journey through Nazi Germany. The edition is edited by Bern literary scholar Oliver Lubrich and British Beckett expert Mark Nixon and published by Suhrkamp Verlag. It is the last major unpublished text by the Nobel Prize winner in Literature and has been eagerly awaited worldwide.
The *German Diaries* are the only diaries that Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) ever kept over a longer period of time. After Beckett’s death, his nephew found them in his Paris apartment. They consist of six notebooks comprising 550 closely written pages. Mark Nixon from the University of Reading, Director of the International Beckett Foundation, and Oliver Lubrich, Professor of Modern German and Comparative Literature at the University of Bern, have now edited them together: as a worldwide first edition in the English original with German translation. The volume runs to 1,352 pages and will be published on 20 August 2026 by Suhrkamp Verlag in Berlin. It is the last work by the Nobel laureate in Literature that has so far remained unpublished.
The edition makes an extraordinary literary and historical document available in full for the first time and in a scholarly annotated format, including translation, chronology, itinerary, indexes and a glossary of Beckett’s idiosyncratic German vocabulary. As Oliver Lubrich notes, the edition brings together literary and contemporary history. Editions in further languages are planned. The project has already attracted considerable international attention in advance and illustrates the impact and societal relevance of humanities research at the University of Bern.
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At the same time, Beckett also records ambivalences – for instance, Nazis who are not personally disagreeable. 'The *German Diaries’*,' says Lubrich, 'are a historical document, the psychogram of a society, and a literary text. They help us to understand how people respond to authoritarian ideologies and how dictatorships function. Unfortunately, these questions remain topical today.' This underlines the importance of the humanities for current debates on democracy.
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The diaries also shed light on the development of Beckett’s thinking and aesthetics. 'The journey is at the same time a laboratory of Beckett’s poetics,' says Lubrich. 'It raises the question of what kind of language can still be found when authoritarian ideologies prevail.' For a long time, Beckett was regarded as an apolitical author. His most famous work, the absurdist play 'Waiting for Godot,' is usually interpreted as a timeless piece about the meaninglessness of existence. 'But now we can read in the diaries how precisely Beckett described totalitarianism,' says editor Lubrich, 'and this play, too, must be understood historically: Two Jews on the run are waiting for their human trafficker, who is to take them across the border into Switzerland.'"
https://mediarelations.unibe.ch/media_releases/2026/media_releases_2026/what_a_schererei_becketts_view_of_nazi_germany/index_eng.html
