After English and French, German can be regarded as Samuel Beckett’s third language. Although he never received any formal instruction, he acquired it through years of intensive self-study, above all by reading German literature. He kept multiple notebooks in which he recorded vocabulary, idioms, proverbs, collocations, and excerpts from his reading. His initial engagement with the language was also biographical in nature: between 1928 and 1932, he made several extended visits to his aunt and uncle, the art dealer William Sinclair, in Kassel, especially during his romantic involvement with his cousin Peggy.
The linguistic inventiveness and delight in wordplay Beckett conveys in the German expressions interwoven into his early prose works Dream of Fair to Middling Women and More Pricks Than Kicks gradually give way to a striving for greater concision and precision already discernible in his German diaries. Yet Beckett’s German, shaped by poetic diction from the outset, retains a certain deliberate artificiality that is inseparable from his poetics. Similar to his use of other languages – most notably French – Beckett’s German serves as a vehicle for linguistic scepticism and a broader critique of language itself.
Most examples of Beckett’s German featured here are drawn from Erika Tophoven’s unpublished compilation "Sams Wörterbuch". We are deeply grateful to her for the generous permission to share this material.
Further reading/sources: Fries-Dieckmann 2007; Gomille 2005; Nixon, “Scraps”; “Writing”; Nixon/van Hulle 2017
Bibliography
- Beckett, Samuel. Alles kommt auf so viel an. Das Hamburg-Kapitel aus den ‘German Diaries,’ 2. Oktober - 4. Dezember 1936 in der Originalfassung, translated by Erika Tophoven, Raamin-Presse, 2003.
- ---. Disjecta. Calder, 1983.
- ---. Dream of fair to middling women. Arcade, 1993.
- ---. The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Edited by Martha Fehsenfeld et al., Cambridge University Press, 2009.
- ---. The Selected Works of Samuel Beckett. 4 vols. Grove Press, 2010.
- Fries-Dieckmann, Marion. Samuel Beckett und die deutsche Sprache. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2007.
- Gomille, Monika. ‘Zwischen den Sprachen und Kulturen: Becketts Selbstübersetzungen.’ Der unbekannte Beckett: Samuel Beckett und die deutsche Kultur, Suhrkamp, 2005, pp. 244–60.
- Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame. Bloomsbury, 1997.
- Mayer, Hans. ‘Brecht’s Drums, a Dog, and Beckett’s Godot.’ Essays on Brecht, edited by Siegfried Mews and Herbert Knust, University of North Carolina Press, 1974, pp. 71–78, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469657967_mews.8.
- Nixon, Mark. Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries: 1936-1937. Continuum, 2011.
- ---. ‘“Scraps of German.” Samuel Beckett Reading German Literature.’ Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, vol. 16, 2006, pp. 259–82.
- Nixon, Mark and Dirk van Hulle. German Fever: Beckett in Deutschland. Edited by Literaturmuseum der Moderne and Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 2017.
- Quadflieg, Roswitha. Beckett was here. Hamburg im Tagebuch Samuel Becketts von 1936. Hoffmann und Campe, 2005.
- Scriba, Arnold. ‘Eintopfsonntag’. Deutsches Historisches Museum, Lebendiges Museum Online, 15 July 2015, https://www.dhm.de/lemo/kapitel/ns-regime/innenpolitik/eintopfsonntag.
- Tophoven, Erika. Becketts Berlin. Nicolai, 2005.
- Tophoven, Erika. Glückliche Jahre. Übersetzerleben in Paris. Gespräche mit Marion Gees. Matthes & Seitz, 2011.
- ---. ‘“Wretched Room, No Zentralheizung and No F.w.” Samuel Beckett im Winter 1937 in Weimar.’ Weimar-Jena, Die Große Stadt : Das Kulturhistorische Archiv, vol. 7, no. 4, 2014, pp. 339–61.
- ‘“Writing.” Die Bedeutung der Deutschlandreise für Becketts schriftstellerische Entwicklung.’ ‘Obergeschoss Still Closed.’ Samuel Beckett in Berlin 1936/37, edited by Lutz Dittrich et al., Matthes & Seitz, 2006, pp. 103–22.