Durs Grünbein in TLS: ‘As the diary begins, Beckett is barely thirty, an unemployed, bespectacled bachelor.’

And: ‘“I know roughly what I am doing”, he writes in his diary, in German. “But I don’t know who I am”. Here, too, the parallels to Goethe, whose Italian journey was intended to help him decide whether he should be a painter or a poet, are striking. Beckett’s prospects, at this point in his life, are anything but clear.’

Also: ‘After months of enduring such fare, he can contain himself no longer: “German food is really terrible”.’

And: ‘In contrast to other visitors to Germany in the 1930s, Beckett shows himself to be an extraordinarily sensitive seismographer of the Nazification of everyday life.’

The cuisine of the Third Reich was rather disappointing. Beckett, the ideal witness of the Nazification of everyday life (‘even Nazi jokes are recorded'’), including language, of course (‘the Judenclique’).

(a sf 2242)