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120 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1946
What is the distance between literature and suffering? Does it depend on the nature of the suffering, on its closeness or on its strength? Is the distance less between poetry and the suffering caused by the reflection of the fire than the distance between poetry and the suffering arising from the fire itself? ...Perhaps we can say that simply to suffer with others is a form of poetry, which feeds a powerful longing for words.I think Dagerman found the right words to convey the suffering he witnessed, but they were not pretty or sentimental words. He observes families sleeping in flooded cellars and victims thirsting for revenge and former Nazi functionaries who somehow find a "trap door" through which to escape justice. He describes an entire generation of lost revolutionaries, betrayed by the liberation that did not turn out to be as radical as they'd hoped it would be and throughout all these stories he maintains a dispassionate tone. He offers no hope, no solace, seeing only sinking people among whom only a few have "the courage to sink," as he writes, "with their eyes open."
[E]veryone in Germany longs to be where they are not, unless they are too old to be able to long or unless they have the desperate courage to believe they have a mission. The Polish teacher longs for Sweden or Norway. She has a picture at home that helps with her longing. It shows a Norwegian fjord -- or the Danube at Siebenbrügen. Would I come home and say which, to save her from longing in the wrong direction?I don't want to make a big deal out of the fact that Dagerman committed suicide at the age of 31. That would be to make this clear-eyed observer of suffering into a romantic figure, and to suggest that his pain mattered more, in the end, than the pain of others. I do think he was a remarkable writer.