German Autumn, by Stig Dagerman

You need a strong stomach to get through German Autumn by Stig Dagerman (1923-1954), the Swedish writer best known for Our Need for Consolation Is Insatiable, a short, moving monologue he wrote six years later. In it, Dagerman dismisses, one after the other, all the consolations offered to our loneliness and difficulty of living, which bring only temporary comfort when they are genuine (like a soul mate, a walk, a living animal next to us) or lead to despair when they are false (pleasures galore). In the end, all our beliefs crumble, but doubt itself seems pretentious because it too is “shrouded in a darkness all its own.” But as long as the force of my words can resist the power of the world, I remain free, and the day when only my silence will protect me, then this “living silence” will be my true consolation and a reason to live. Not the cheerful type, really, but the perfect person to go and report, at the age of 23, on what was happening among the Germans in that “gloomy season with rain, cold” of 1946.

It took courage—and nerve—for him to disembark in Germany a year after the end of the war, the country now in Allied hands, wander from town to town among the ruins, staying with locals, going down into water-covered cellars where completely lost people were feeding in the dark on disgusting meat and dirty vegetables, and drawing our pity on them after all Germany had done. While journalists in 1946 talk politics from comfortable newsrooms, Dagerman looks at the country on a human scale. He sees children of six or seven whose “eyes are at least ten years older,” he hears cries of pain, dogs whimpering, everywhere “the air tingles with hysteria.”

Relations between the Germans themselves are hardly edifying. In a bakery, a man with a big stick forces his way past waiting women and seizes what bread is left on the counter. As an industrial center, the Ruhr (to the west) was one of the hardest-hit regions during the final years of the war, with massive bombing raids destroying everything and causing huge civilian casualties. Many inhabitants were evacuated to Bavaria (to the south-east). With the war barely over, the Bavarians wanted to get rid of these cumbersome refugees and send them back home. So they put them in wagons that had become unsuitable for transporting goods because they let in the rain, but they’ll do for humans. When they arrive at their destination, the engine is uncoupled from its twenty or so wagons, which are left parked there for weeks with whole families inside, sleeping on straw, coughing, wandering along the tracks to find something to eat, sometimes dying of hunger.

Everything that grows out of misery follows: theft, prostitution, black market, armed attacks by idle youth. But Dagerman refuses to judge from a fixed moral high ground. “Black-marketing and prostitution are not immoral when they have become the only means of survival,” just as “there are conditions in which it is not immoral to steal since in these circumstances theft means not depriving someone of his property but a more just distribution of available goods.”

He also avoids the trap of depicting what he sees as a spectacle. His aim is to give us a raw, heartfelt account of the moral horrors he observes. He doesn’t look away from the thorniest difficulty: under the principle of collective responsibility we punish the entire population for the war crimes committed by the Third Reich. But was there such a thing as German collective guilt? Better still, many of the ordinary men and women he meets were undoubtedly former Nazi sympathizers, who had acted out of blind obedience to the demented power in place, and were perhaps not undeserving of punishment; but “isn’t obedience itself ultimately what designates the individual’s relation to authority in every state in the world?”

Dagerman attends denazification trials. There were up to a hundred trials a day in small towns. In Stuttgart alone, 120,000 people were tried:

“From the questioning of the witnesses we can feel a cold draught from the time of terror, a fragment of history so far invisible can flare into life for a few short, charged moments and make the air tremble in the raw court-room.”

But Dagerman knows how to distinguish between sincere and hypocritical testimony. In the witness box, an excited youngster who had sworn allegiance to Hitler at the age of 14 retorts to the prosecutor: “But Hitler was a man the whole world recognized. Statesmen came here and signed treaties. The Pope was the first to recognize him. I’ve seen a picture showing the Pope shaking hands with him.” Others ask why they should be punished for fighting for their country. And a prosecutor, himself dispossessed of all his property by the Americans, acknowledges that “no young people have been more mistreated than you.” In the end, they try to stick to those on whom the heaviest charges are laid.

The young writer reminds us that we cannot see everything in black or white. The Germans’ lack of remorse was a scandal, “but, Dagerman writes, one ought to keep in mind that one’s own sufferings make it more difficult to understand other people’s sufferings.” (Later, Primo Levi would deplore the Germans’ lack of repentance, while acknowledging the power that a totalitarian state can have over the population.)

In Munich, Dagerman found himself on Prinzeregentstrasse, the street from which Gustav Aschenbach—“one of the unhappiest heroes of world literature, once started his journey towards death in Venice.” His reporting led him to discover that suffering cannot be communicated, that it is mute, like a Dachau survivor whose wife, a writer who herself spent several years in a camp, tries in vain to get him to recount his experiences. Time has to establish a distance before we can talk about it. Dagerman has merciless paragraphs about local writers, well housed, well fed and with a well-stocked library, who dip their pens into the beauty of suffering or ruins. Suffering cannot be put into words. Ruins are dirty and repulsive.

The book reports on the condition of the Germans in a clear, crisp, incisive style, without embellishments or sentimentality, but where compassion shines amid its lucidity. The thirteen articles appeared in a Swedish weekly (Expressen), but Dagerman refused to consider himself a journalist. In a letter to a friend, he wrote that for him “journalism is the art of coming too late as early as possible.” He had chosen to rub shoulders with the victims. Yet German Autumn is undoubtedly one of the best pieces of reportage ever written, in terms of its realism. A short story writer and novelist who became famous in his own country in his twenties, Dagerman took his own life, perhaps by accident, at the age of 31, two years after writing Our Need for Consolation, following a long depression caused, according to most of his commentators, not by his vision of the world but by a tenacious blank-page syndrome.

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Quotes from German Autumn are taken from the U.S. edition published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2011, in a translation by Robin Fulton Macpherson that was first published in Great Britain in 1988.

Quotes from Our Need for Consolation are taken from Steven Hartman’s translation, published in Little Star, issue 5, 2014.

Dagerman’s letter to a friend is quoted by Steven Hartman in a lecture on Dagerman delivered at the New York State Writers Institute in 2013.