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    1944 Diary
    1944 Diary
    1944 Diary
    Ebook233 pages3 hours

    1944 Diary

    By Hans Keilson

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    [1944 Diary] is a deeply personal account, made even more remarkable that it was written during World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust . . . A moving and fascinating read." —Library Journal

    In 2010, FSG published two novels by the German- Jewish writer Hans Keilson: Comedy in a Minor Key—written in 1944 while Keilson was in hiding in the Netherlands, first published in German in 1947, and never before in English—and The Death of the Adversary, begun in 1944 and published in 1959, also in German. With their Chekhovian sympathy for perpetrators and bystanders as well as for victims and resisters, Keilson’s novels were, as Francine Prose said on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, “masterpieces” by “a genius” on her list of “the world’s very greatest writers.” Keilson was one hundred years old, alive and well and able to enjoy his belated fame.

    1944 Diary, rediscovered among Keilson’s papers shortly after his death, covers nine months he spent in hiding in Delft with members of a Dutch resistance group, having an affair with a younger Jewish woman in hiding a few blocks away and striving to make a moral and artistic life for himself as the war and the Holocaust raged around him. For readers familiar with Keilson’s novels as well as those new to his work, this diary is an incomparable spiritual X-ray of the mind and heart behind the art: a record of survival and creativity in what Keilson called “the most critical year of my life.”

    Offering further insight into Keilson are the sonnets he wrote for his lover, Hanna Sanders, which appear in translation at the back of this volume.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJun 6, 2017
    ISBN9780374713898
    1944 Diary
    Author

    Hans Keilson

    Hans Keilson is the author of Comedy in a Minor Key and The Death of the Adversary. Born in Germany in 1909, he published his first novel in 1933. During World War II he joined the Dutch resistance. Later, as a psychotherapist, he pioneered the treatment of war trauma in children. He died in 2011 at the age of 101.

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    Reviews for 1944 Diary

    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      This book seemed like a weird choice, even to me (given my strict no book set in Europe between the wars rule), but something compelled me both to check it out and to pluck it from my library pile long before a dozen books that seemed more in my wheelhouse.I almost put this book down so many times during the first half because Keilson's condescending misogyny was driving me absolutely up the wall. Thankfully, as the fighting got closer, those aspects faded away, and Keilson's diary turned more to literature, to his life's purpose, and to deeper emotional connections. So I started the book annoyed, became more and more empathetic with Keilson in the second half, and then... the poetry. The first few poems I felt were nice enough love sonnets, but like the diary itself, the more I read the more deeply I was moved and the higher I esteemed Keilson. These sonnets aren't just about love, but about love and horror -- both the horror of that utter vulnerability of love and also the horror of death and war all around them -- it all became enmeshed.I wish I could say that I learned something deep about living in a time of horror -- but all I learned is that our stupid hearts go on the same -- loving, selfish, grasping for meaning, making plans, enmeshed in our own private dramas.
    • 3/5
      An intimate and personal look into the life of one man. Provides a view into his thoughts and activities in the midst of war and holocaust. A focus on the human interactions in the middle of the history.

    Book preview

    1944 Diary - Hans Keilson

    Diary

    Conscience—or conflict? What are the motives driving me: self-justification or reflection? Defense or acknowledgment. Guilt or atonement, crime or punishment. Both. I have reached the point where I can drop my disguise. Finally. I am grateful to—yes, to whom? The first time I kept a kind of personal diary was as a boy, before my bar mitzvah. It was on my father’s letterhead with his business and bank account information on the sheets of paper. The entries recorded my religious feelings.¹ Later, when I began to write, I burned it. I thought it was unnecessary, my writing seemed to be confession and record

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