Beckett in Germany

On 28/09/36, Beckett set out from his childhood home, Cooldrinagh, for Cóbh (Cork), where he embarked the next day on the S.S. Washington. Via Le Havre, he arrived in Hamburg on 02/10/36 and, over the course of the following six months, visited more than 20 cities and towns on a southward journey through Germany. He flew back to the British Isles from Munich on 04/04/37.

Beckett’s reasons for undertaking the trip were several: to jolt himself out of creative inertia, to possibly reorient his career, to revisit a country with which he associated memories both joyful and painful. But his main objective arguably was the idea of a Bildungsreise. During his time in Germany, Beckett studied as much art and architecture as he could and was equally interested in sculpture and painting of the medieval period, the work of the Old Masters of the Renaissance through the 18th century, and modern art.

For every day without fail, Beckett recorded where he walked, ate, drank, and shopped for books, what he read, who he met and what he spoke about with them, and what he thought especially about the art he saw, in a series of six notebooks: the German Diaries (external link, opens in a new window).  

The focus of the German Diaries and this module are the visual arts. Both the places Beckett visited and the artists whose work he studied during his six months in Germany are too numerous to cover in full. Module B casts a spotlight on five stations of his journey – Hamburg (external link, opens in a new window), Berlin (external link, opens in a new window), Dresden (external link, opens in a new window), Nuremberg (external link, opens in a new window), and Regensburg (external link, opens in a new window) – and selected artworks.

The six notebooks of the Diaries were discovered after Beckett’s death in 1989. At this time, only the Hamburg chapter is published in transcript. Quotations from the Diaries used in the Berlin, Dresden, and Nürnberg segments of this module are borrowed from the editorial and scholarly work on the manuscripts in the past three decades. The content presented in this module is thus indebted to the fundamental research done on the German Diaries by Conor Carville, James Knowlson, Mark Nixon, and Erika Tophoven.

The complete edition of the German Diaries, edited by Mark Nixon and Oliver Lubrich, is forthcoming with Suhrkamp Verlag.

Regensburg University Library is grateful to Mark Nixon for making available the transcript of the Diaries’ Regensburg pages, and to Suhrkamp Verlag for permission to reproduce the sections used in Module B.

Further reading/sources:
Carville 2018; Fehsenfeld/Overbeck 2009; Knowlson 1996, 2009; Nixon 2010, 2011; DLA Marbach 2017; Quadflieg 2006; Quadflieg/Tophoven 2003; Radlmaier 2011; Tophoven 2005