Published for the first time this month, the Irish writer\u2019s record of his months in pre-war Germany is a fascinating insight into his understanding of, and unease with, Nazism<\/p>\n
War was not yet on the immediate horizon when Samuel Beckett visited the German city of Hamburg in October 1936, but after watching the apoplexy that Adolf Hitler\u2019s braying induced in ordinary Germans, the Irish playwright was certain that peace could not last. \u201cThey\u2019ll need to fight soon (or burst),\u201d he noted in his diary on 6 October.<\/p>\n
The six notebooks that Beckett compiled during his six-month journey across Germany between late September 1936 and April 1937, published for the first time by German publisher Suhrkamp on 20 August<\/a> this year, put paid to a commonly held view of the author of Waiting for Godot as a poet of pure pessimism, interested in despair and stasis but unconcerned by real-life politics.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/aae66892cbac156a9bfd60f9adfb83eb8e10fd4e\/202_0_4791_3833\/master\/4791.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=92227ad779763b36cef148a049165a89\" "\\"\u2018Their")
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