German Autumn

Dagerman wrote his account of the circumstances of the German people after their defeat in WWII as a reporter for a Swedish newspaper in 1946, publishing the accounts as a book shortly afterward. This paperback reprint of the 1988 English translation, featuring a foreword by writer Mark Kurlansky, makes available to English readers his compelling, open-eyed account of the suffering, ironies, destruction, and injustices of life in postwar Germany. The work remains perpetually relevant by evoking so effectively the universal human experience found in the aftermath of any war. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
In late 1946, Stig Dagerman was assigned by the Swedish newspaper Expressen to report on life in Germany immediately after the fall of the Third Reich. First published in Sweden in 1947, German Autumn, a collection of the articles written for that assignment, was unlike any other reporting at the time. While most Allied and foreign journalists spun their writing on the widely held belief that the German people deserved their fate, Dagerman disagreed and reported on the humanness of the men and women ruined by the war—their guilt and suffering. Dagerman was already a prominent writer in Sweden, but the publication and broad reception of German Autumn throughout Europe established him as a compassionate journalist and led to the long-standing international influence of the book.Presented here in its first American edition with a compelling new foreword by Mark Kurlansky, Dagerman’s essays on the tragic aftermath of war, suffering, and guilt are as hauntingly relevant today amid current global conflict as they were sixty years ago.
The first U.S. edition of Dagerman’s account of postwar life in Germany