GERMAN AUTUMN

German Autumn (Tysk Höst, 1947). Translation by Robin Fulton Macpherson. Foreword by Mark Kurlansky. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

Considered a classic, German Autumn, is a collection of journalistic essays that Stig Dagerman wrote on assignment to post-war Germany in the fall of 1946 – the year of Nuremburg Trials, de-nazification and democratic elections. What were on the minds of ordinary Germans this fall? Dagerman was trusted to deliver a unique report: his voice was young and fresh, anti-fascist and anti-communist, and he was fluent in German. He had relatives on the ground having married into a family of German political refugees (the mother and sister of his father-in-law had survived Ravensbrück). Dagerman crisscrossed the British and American zones seeking out a wide range of German civilian voices from survivors of the left, old democrats and refugees, to Nazified civilians, many employed by the Allies, and lost youth. He describes life among the ruins in the cities and the relatively unscathed countryside. He attends political rallies and de-nazification courts. His becomes a unique document about Germany at this specific point in time, written in a literary essay style that will inspire journalists for years to come. And Dagerman, describing the desperate life in German bombed-out cities, poses a harrowing question about our own values: Of the cruelties of the past practiced by Germans in and out of Germany there can only be one opinion, since of cruelty in general, of whatever kind and whoever practices it, there can be only one opinion. But it is another matter to ask if it is now right, if it is not indeed a cruelty, to regard the sufferings of the Germans as justified …