Essay
German Autumn
Tysk höst
Stig Dagerman · 1947
Opening lines
Hösten 1946 föll de tyska höstlöven för tredje gången efter det berömda Churchilltalet om en stundande lövfällning.
In the autumn of 1946 the German autumn leaves fell for the third time since Churchill's famous speech about an impending fall of leaves.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from litteraturbanken.se
Synopsis
Germany, autumn 1946. The writer travels for a few weeks through the cities destroyed by bombing, from Hamburg to Munich. He goes down into flooded cellars where families live, climbs into overcrowded trains, sees the refugees from the East arrive whom nobody wants, attends the justice of denazification and asks ordinary people what they think. Where most Allied and foreign journalists judged that the Germans had deserved their fate, he describes the hunger, the cold and the suffering of the guilty as of the others.
Context
The book grew out of a commission: the daily Expressen sent its author to Germany in the autumn of 1946, and the articles appeared in volume form from Norstedts in 1947. He was twenty-three, spoke German and had already published two novels. The 2010 Swedish edition has a preface by Elfriede Jelinek, and a 2008 French documentary, 1946, automne allemand, took its commentary from it. In French, the book appeared from Actes Sud in 1980 in Philippe Bouquet's translation; in English, from Quartet in 1988, then from the University of Minnesota Press in 2011.
Who it is for
A short book, made up of chapters each of which covers a single city or scene; it can be read in Swedish, French or English.
Prizes and reception
The best known of his journalistic texts, received throughout Europe and has become a classic of postwar reportage.
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