1944 Diary

by Hans Keilson, Damion Searls (Translator)

[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 JournalIn 2010, FSG published two novels by the German- Jewish writer Hans 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 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.

Genres: World War II, Nonfiction, Holocaust, Memoir, History, European History, Autobiography

208 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

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. In a 2010 New York Times review, Francine Prose called Keilson a “genius” and “one of the world’s very greatest writers.” He died in 2011 at the age of 101.

http://us.macmillan.com/author/hanske...

Reviews

[Linden · Rating 3 out of 5]

This diary was written as Keilson was in hiding in the Netherlands. A great deal of it centers on his indecision over his wife and his mistress; not as much about his day to day struggle as a Jew. His book Comedy in a Minor Key was stunning. This one was a bit disappointing in comparison.

[José Van Rosmalen · Rating 4 out of 5]

De op hoge leeftijd herontdekte schrijver- psychiater Hans Keilson schreef in 1944 een dagboek, dat in 2014, na zijn dood op ruim honderdjarige leeftijd, in het Duits en het Nederlands is uitgebracht.

Keilson was in 1944 vijfendertig jaar en kon vanwege zijn onderduik in Delft niet als arts functioneren. Het dagboek is vol van zelfbeschouwing en kritische analyse. Hij spaart anderen en zichzelf niet. Hij is getrouwd en vader van een jonge dochter en heeft ook een intieme verhouding met een jonge vrouw, een meisje nog. Uiteindelijk kiest hij voor vrouw en dochter, maar dat gaat niet zonder slag of stoot.

Bij het jaar 1944 in west Nederland heb ik het beeld van honger en voor wat betreft de joden, het voortdurende risico op opgepakt worden en naar Westerbork en verder te worden gestuurd. Keilson was zich daar ook al wel van bewust, maar het speelt in dit dagboek slechts een rol op de achtergrond. Zijn liefdesleven en zijn belangstelling voor literatuur houden hem meer bezig.

Een voor mij opvallende passage gaat over de dichter Gerrit Achterberg, die Keilson heeft meegemaakt in een psychiatrische inrichting, waarin hij terecht was gekomen vanwege de moord op de zestienjarige dochter van zijn hospita in Utrecht.

Achterberg was kennelijk niet in staat tot wezenlijk schuldgevoel. Hij vond het voldoende om te zeggen dat ‘hij er toch vijf gedichten over had geschreven.’ Alsof hij daarmee het meisje tot leven wekte.

Bij Keilson proef je wel schuldgevoel over zijn dubbele verhouding en zijn neiging dat lang op zijn beloop te laten.

Het boek is waarschijnlijk niet geschreven om uitgegeven te worden. Wat je er uit kunt lezen is dat het leven op het moment zelf toch anders in elkaar stak en anders kon worden ervaren dan je volgens het inmiddels ingesleten beeld van het laatste oorlogsjaar zou denken.

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was put off by the book at first - since it might seem overly self-absorbed but its power became apparent when I got to the sonnets, which appear after the diary. They are extraordinary and the diary is the light that illuminates the context within which they were written.

I highly recommend this book, it probably makes sense to read it twice since the diary supports or makes clear the poems, which are even in translation excellent.

The author, Hans Keilson, a German Jewish medical student/writer/poet, began the diary in March 1944, when he was 35 years old and in hiding in Delft, where he had fled 9 years before. Keilson could circulate freely in Holland since he had mastered Dutch by the time the war started and had obtained forged identity documents showing that he was a Dutch Christian doctor (born in the Dutch E. Indies). During the war, Keilson counseled Resistance people throughout Holland, as well as actually tutoring the daughters of the Christian couple who were hiding him (his ostensible job).

In 1944, he had started an affair with a young Jewish Dutch woman named Hanna, who had lost her parents in the bombing of Rotterdam, who was in hiding at the apartment of another Resistance couple a few blocks away. The sonnets were written for Hanna. His wife Gertrud, a Christian, and their young daughter, Barbara, were living in another city in Holland. In addition to writing fiction and poetry, Keilson played the violin, attended medical school classes in Delft, and assisted the Resistance with various tasks.

The diary includes observations of street life, musings about people he meets, his conversations with others in his circle of friends. It's the ups and downs of his emotional state, his intense self-examination that was triggered by the affair with Hanna that form the crux of the diary. He grasps at anything he can find - films, classical music, nature, books, poetry - as a way of understanding eternal questions, and what is going on within him. He's really excellent with describing conversations and social interactions in general - very aware of interpersonal relations, also, how the relations are affected by the war.

Here are the quotes:

"[3/22/44] Does [Gertrud] ... realize I'm trying to enlarge my inner possibilities before the end of the war gives me outward possibilities too?"

"[3/28/44] [A conversation with Dr. Fetter, a Domine.] "Not as a mediator. It is a danger for God, as Rilke said." Fetter said nothing, nodded. "And that he saved one part of mankind and not the other -- that is unacceptable. And the direct relationship with God is lost."

"[3/31/44] [On seeing an old couple - the man hobbling along on two canes, the woman blind.] She couldn't see how fragile he was and maybe felt like more of an invalid than him. He could still be her protector, her knight in shining armor. Maybe he had to live this long and grow this old to make this dream of his early years a reality. Before, when she would see, it hadn't come true, but now... I couldn't think of any other explanation for their harmony and contentment."

"I approach art musically. I hear from the sentence how the melody should continue."

"[After seeing a film about Mozart twice in a row.] A world rose up before me. Greed was gone, natural joy and beauty had broken through. I was in a state of rapture!"

"[6/18/44] Gertrud told me her dream where Barbara finished the song that Gertrud couldn't' sing to the end."

"[6/21/44] A trip with illegal documents. I'm drawn to death. More and more. Attached it it like a fly on flypaper -- first one leg, eventually all six."

"Slept. In a better mood. Well rested, or because the reality of the sleeping state alleviates the contradictions of the waking state. Sleep suits them better."

"[9/8/44] "[Rilke's] ... importance will only grow, as the issue of how to re-create humanity in Germany becomes a live question."

"[On starting to write poetry again.] The creative process is impossible to understand. It is the opposite of consciousness. The other side of the coin."

"[9/12/44] Painful thoughts about after the liberation. Will the Dutch have kept their good qualities; their public integrity, their tendency to judge each case individually? Of will they come out "changed.""

"[9/23/44] [On a dream.] The way I've always pictured a man being there for a woman in time of need -- that was how I was with her. I encouraged her, took her hand as I talked."

"[10/8/44] A sword is hanging over our heads: that we will be randomly arrested and summarily shot over some real or imagined act of sabotage."

"[After seeing a reading of "Hamlet."] Hamlet's misguided ideas about the doer and the deed. he confuses those who act out of passion with those who act from the intellect. His conflict is really between dreaming (letting it happen) and doing (making it happen)."

"[10/24/44] The question of class is so closely tied to the function, the specific daemon or function of a human being."

"[10/31/44] What I am is a schlemiel! Walking down the street, happy as a schoolboy, in a outwardly shabby raincoat, shoes worn flat at the heels and falling apart, a bum, and yet self-satisfied, in possession of nothing except Nothing, a wife and child, happy when I play a little music or when a poem works out - a schlemiel, a total failure across the board , except in one thing: Nothing!"

"My ambition has vanished into thin air. That's how anyone who talks about me should see me. Finally for once, with no persona. No mask."

"We're beyond tragedy. A schlemiel has nothing to do with any of that anymore. The fool sings in a comedy whatever the circumstances."

"[11/7/44] [After receiving compliments on his poetry from a poetry aficionado who is also a relative of one of the Resistance people.] I was a little surprised at myself -- at how sincerely calm I stayed in spite of the happiness she was giving me. Is this the result of the so-called via dolorosa, which makes a person indifferent to success and honor, or is it truly that what i care about now are the poems -- the poem itself and not what I might achieve with it."

"My literary ambition, which used to aspire to being compared with poets like _____, is almost entirely gone. I just write, I leave literary criticism to others."

"[11/12/44] When I'm with [Hanna] ... it's like I have entered a new clime."

"[11/25/44] Hitler ...didn't give the Germans freedom, only authority. The great hater of mankind, the greatest nihilist of the West, devouring his own people!"

"[11/30/44] Music actually is the mirroring of the irrational, in optima forma. But words have another, symbolic significance. A word is attached to its content, and verbal content is different from sound content. Verbal content remains linked to what the word emerges from; giving meaning to the sound presupposes, i.e. includes, a mental process, which can stand on its own and thus be considered in isolation. The result is an act that can be labeled intellectualism."

"Poetry has no goal, it has only sources -- all of which come, flow, from life and into life. It is self-presentation: an unending path from nothingness to nothingness."

"[12/3/44] How a person's mood depends on his stomach. On new stimulation."

"[12/9/44] Disobedience is one of he best and most valuable qualities I know. I mean refusing to follow the prescribed, sensible course of events, refusing to behave property, the way one expects you to behave. This "one" is the devil of civlizaiton. The great tempter, urging you to leave everything else untried, untested. The Germans don't' have much of it -- for them, subordination and obedience is the Lord's Prayer, unfortunately the God they pray to is stupidity, and the church where they pray to this God is the Party."

"[12/12/44] The key can always be found again, or made. But this accursed transcendence, which leaves the "making" up to immanence and at the same time despises it."

"[12/22/44] I believe, I do, I believe - but the moment I have to say what I believe in, I destroy my belief. So, my belief floats in thin air? Yes, it floats. In the air? Yes, it is light and invisible as air."

"Is this what remains. I believe... Where do the dreams come from? Don't ask. Reason contradicts itself when it denies itself.-"

Lines from the sonnets:

"[XII] ...before long our friends had come
to visit. Only, Death notes down the guests,
then hunts them all down - one by one by one."

"[XVII] Branches of one tree,
like flowers on one stem,
grow in the Orphic sky

with no purpose or end."

"[XXI] He who finds rest in himself descends undaunted
the path that leads out into nothingness."

"[XXVI] Come, sleep! Here your bed is made:
valerian blossoms, poppy's shade.
All the wild beasts silent fall."

"[XXIX] The way one hurls far
from the shore hook and bait,
throw yourself into time."

"[XLIII] At first is praise, the end procures rebukes;
the clock of destiny no longer wants to toll."

"[XLVI] You carry the last brick to the house of life
where the fugitive will stay, he whom love ties."

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 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.

[Lynn Leatherman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book took me awhile to divulge because Keilson’s thoughts are not something to just skip through. A little hard in some places to relate to because of the lack of knowledge of the literature that he was inspired by. However, the footnotes do well to explain and I honestly loved looking into the things they said and he said. If you want an honest and literal look into what it was like to be a refugee in an occupied country during WW II this book really fits the bill. I’m inspired to read his other short novels about this time period

[Stefanie Robinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the personal wartime diary of Hans Keilson. I always appreciate these personal, first hand accounts of events during the war. The only problem that I had with this book was that it seemed very scattered at times, though it was a personal diary, so that is to be expected. It was an entertaining book, and I got a decent feel for the climate that he was living in during this time period.

[M · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting account from the war. I wish there had been more information on the author in an introduction.

[Lia · Rating 1 out of 5]

Dagboek van een oppervlakkige man die zichzelf erg belangrijk vindt.

[Stef K · Rating 1 out of 5]

Super saai!