Der unbekannte Beckett: Samuel Beckett und die deutsche Kultur, and: Warten auf Godot (review)

Samuel Beckett was a connoisseur of German culture. In his twenties and early thirties, he traveled frequently and obsessively in Germany, and even wrote to his close friend Thomas MacGreevy of his "German fever." His early travels, between 1928 and 1932, were visits to Kassel to his aunt and uncle, Cissie and William Sinclair, and more importantly, to their daughter, Peggy, with whom Beckett had an intense and tempestuous love affair. Between 1936 and 1937 Beckett spent a further six months traveling in Germany, meeting German artists and intellectuals, and seeing what he could of famous museums and private art collections, by this time already suffering from the censorship of the Nazi regime. "All the modern pictures are in the cellars," Beckett complained in a letter to Mary Manning Howe (26)."The trip is being a failure. Germany is horrible" (119). However, a third period of frequent travels was to follow, this time in the divided Germany, where, from the 1960s to the 1980s, Beckett directed his stage and television plays. In 1967, Beckett directed Endspiel (Endgame) at the Schiller-Theater in Berlin, followed by productions of Das letzte Band (Krapp's Last Tape), Glückliche Tage (Happy Days), Warten auf Godot (Waiting for Godot), and Spiel (Play). From the mid-1960s, he also directed his television plays for Süddeutscher Rundfunk in Stuttgart. Nacht und Träume, Beckett's last television play, although not his last televised play, was even specifically written for Süddeutscher Rundfunk, at the request of its director, Reinhart Müller-Freienfels. Beckett famously preferred working at SDR to collaborating with the BBC, for the German institution, he felt, was more accommodating of his artistic vision and, as Der unbekannte Beckett argues, less interested in profit and spectator numbers than artistic quality and integrity.

Der unbekannte Beckett consists of seventeen timely essays, seven of them by British Beckett scholars, nine by German ones, and one by the American Everett Frost, a well-known figure in Beckett studies. The most prolific contributor, Mark Nixon, is also one of the most interesting. He is an expert on Beckett's German Diaries that consist of six exercise books of Beckett's notes and observations on his six-month journey through Nazi Germany in 1936 and 1937. Nixon has contributed three essays that elucidate aspects of Beckett's life and interests hitherto only touched upon by other scholars. Amongst the greatest revelations are the number of comments the famously reticent Beckett made about the political situation in Germany. The journals reveal how carefully, and with what distaste, Beckett followed developments in the country, commenting, for instance, on having, "[l]ike a fool," listened to a radio broadcast of "2 hours of Hitler and an hour of Goering" (24). He found the rhetoric of the regime distasteful, and complained in his diary that "the expression 'historical necessity' + 'Germanic destiny' start the vomit moving upwards" (25). Nixon's essays reveal a very different Beckett from the apolitical figure who, in certain received readings, was only interested in the "human condition." Other highlights of the collection include Mary Bryden's essay on Beckett and German music (Strauss, Brahms, and Mendelssohn), with an interesting analysis of Beckett's musical preferences and Julian Garforth's contribution on the influence on Beckett's writing of the work of the German Karl Valentin, whom the author saw and referred to, in his German Diaries, as a "[r]eal quality comedian, exuding depression" (281 n.1).

The essays in this collection rely heavily on archival material, such as notebooks, letters, and diaries, which make it of great interest to Beckett scholars. The volume provides a wealth of detailed factual information about Beckett's moves, personal comments, translation practices, and interest in German literature and philosophy and the authors have done an impressive...