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Whereas access to public collections was severely restricted, modern art could still be viewed in private collections, ‘where alone living art is to be seen’ as Beckett told MacGreevy (SB to TM, 28 November 1936). One of the most fascinating aspects of Beckett’s German trip is the degree to which he managed to make contact with, and was welcomed by, a wide circle of artists and art historians. Many of these were the very representatives and defenders of German Modernism that the Nazis were driving out of public institutions.¹⁵ It was through these people that Beckett received fi rst-hand accounts of the cultural repression and personal persecutions ordered by the Nazi regime, being informed, for example, of impending prohibitions of art books: ‘Hear that Barlach & Nolde books are to be banned next year.

I.e. buy Nolde quick’ (GD, 10 November 1936).¹⁶

In Hamburg, society ladies and art collectors, Margaritha Durrieu and Helene Fera, introduced Beckett to what he termed an ‘energetic underground’ of painters, including Willem Grimm, Karl Ballmer and Karl Kluth (SB to TM, 28 November 1936 [misdated by Beckett 1937]).¹⁷ In a letter to MacGreevy he observed that they ‘are all more or less suppressed, i.e. cannot exhibit publicly and dare sell only with precaution’ (SB to TM, 28 November 1936 [misdated by Beckett 1937]). Yet he also admired the

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apolitical attitude of these Hamburg artists, who ‘are all profoundly serious and therefore only a very little disturbed by the offi cial attitude towards them’. The persecutions to which these painters were subject was exemplifi ed by the case of the Jewish painter Gretchen Wohlwill, who informed Beckett that she was ‘excluded from all professional activities’

and could ‘have a closed exhibition to which only Jews may be invited’ (GD, 24 November 1936). Beckett’s interest in the plight of the artist in Nazi Germany is revealed by the fact that he copied out the offi cial commun-ication Wohlwill had received from the authorities.

Wohlwill’s position as a Jewish painter in Germany in 1936 was mirrored by that of the art historian and Schmidt-Rottluff specialist, Rosa Schapire, who (as Beckett noted in his diary) stoically ‘[r]eveals she is fortunate[ly]

not of pure Aryan descent, & therefore cannot publish nor give public lectures’ (GD, 15 November 1936). She also enabled Beckett to gain access to the ‘Magazin’ of the Hamburger Kunsthalle, a cellar room to which works by Expressionists had been banished (GD, 19 November 1936; see Mühling 2003). Schapire’s art criticism would later be exhibited in the

‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition in Munich in 1937, a fate similarly suffered by Will Grohmann, another eminent art historian whom Beckett met.

Grohmann had published various monographs on artists such as Klee and Kandinsky, and despite enforced retirement ‘like all others of his kidney’

(SB to TM, 16 February 1937), was unwilling to think of exile. As Beckett noted, Grohmann argued that

it is more interesting to stay than to go, even if it were feasible to go. They can’t control thoughts. Length of regime impossible to estimate, depends mostly on economic outshot. If it breaks down it is fi tting for him &

his kind to be on the spot, to go under or become active again. (GD, 2 February 1937)¹⁸

It was through people such as Grohmann that Beckett was able to see many private collections of modern art, not only in Hamburg but across Germany, which allowed him to gain a greater appreciation of Expressionist painting in particular. In Halle he was thus able to see the Weise collection of works predominantly by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. And Günther Franke, who continued to show ‘degenerate’ art in his Graphisches Kabinett in Munich, allowed Beckett to view his Max Beckmann collection (GD, 15 March 1937);

Beckett had previously admired the painter’s ‘excellent colour sense’ in the Kunstverein Rabenstrasse in Hamburg (GD, 13 November 1936).¹⁹ Yet argu-ably the most important private art collection that Beckett saw in Germany,

beside that of the late Max Sauerlandt in Hamburg, was that of Ida Bienert in Dresden. Despite the fact that, as Beckett points out, Ida Bienert was supportive of the new regime, she feared the seizure of her modern art collection. She thus gave Beckett the catalogue of her collection ‘on condition that I show it to nobody in Germany’ (GD, 15 February 1937), her reticence no doubt also stemming from the fact that the discredited art historian Will Grohmann had compiled the catalogue.²⁰

Beckett admired many of the Expressionist paintings he saw in public as well as in private collections throughout Germany. At fi rst he tended to limit himself to descriptions and evaluations of the technical aspects, such as the use of colour or the overall composition, of paintings. But as his knowledge deepened, Beckett was able to declare Kirchner to be ‘the most important artist’ of the early Expressionist group ‘Die Brücke’ (GD, 2 Febuary 1937). In giving expression to emotional atmospheres or states of mind, Kirchner used what he himself referred to as nature’s primordial hieroglyphs, and set these into simplifi ed yet distorted forms. Again, it was the stylistic elements that Beckett emphasised in his praise for Kirchner, admiring his ‘incredible line & sureness of taste & fi neness of colour’ (GD, 19 January 1937). Attracted to the immediacy of emotive expression within form and colour, Beckett similarly emphasised and praised the directness of Otto Müller’s landscapes.

Beckett did not, however, merely admire Expressionist paintings for their technique, but was on occasion also drawn to their intensely evocative psychologies. This is evident in his response to Nolde’s Christus und die Kinder (Christ and the Children, 1910):

clot of yellow infants, long green back of Christ (David?) leading to black

& beards of Apostles. Lovely eyes of child held in His arms. Feel at once on terms with the picture, & that I want to spend a long time before it, &

play it over & over like the record of a quartet. (GD, 19 November 1936) Beckett also admired the artistic and emotional statements of Edvard Munch. He was particularly impressed by the painting Mädchen auf der Brücke (Three Women Standing on a Bridge, c. 1900), which he was able to see in the private collection of Heinrich C. Hudtwalcker in Hamburg. One of several paintings Munch painted of the theme, Beckett judged it the

‘best Munch I have seen’ (GD, 22 November 1936).²¹ Beckett was also impressed by an ‘exquisite’ Munch painting, which he terms ‘Einsamkeit’

(GD, 20 January 1937).²² Commenting on the painting on two different occasions, the ‘pale unlimited motionless emptiness of sea’ and the fi gure

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of the woman on the shore reminded him of a line from Racine’s Phèdre:

‘Elle mourût aux bords . . .’ (GD, 19 December 1936).²³ Beckett’s sensitivity to the psychological expression of moods reappears in his comments on a painting by Max Beckmann, where he states that the ‘head & shoulders of Ulysses beautifully felt & painted’ (GD, 15 March 1937).

Beckett’s interest in German Expressionism was not limited to paintings, but extended to the plastic work of Ernst Barlach, whom he appears to have particularly admired. Beckett bought Carl Dietrich Carls’s book on Ernst Barlach in the ‘Zeichner des Volkes’ series, which included 85 illustrations and discussed all areas of the German’s work – graphic, plastic and literary (GD, 4 November 1936).²⁴ Beckett’s thoughts on Barlach led him to note

‘[h]is name X Maillol in Murphy?’ (GD1, 4 November 1936), resulting in one of the few changes Beckett made to the original typescript of Murphy.

The German sculptor thus appears in the reference to ‘the Pergamene Barlach’ (Mu, 148), setting up a contrast between the ‘dreadful machine’ of the Pergamon Altar and Barlach’s intensely emotional portrayals of human suffering (GD, 26 December 1936). Beckett subsequently showed immense interest in this artist’s pieces whenever he saw them, commenting for example on the wood sculpture Sterben (Dying) that it had the ‘right smile on the dead’ (GD, 16 March 1937). As with the early Roman sculpture Beckett admired during his trip to Germany, Barlach’s fi gures strikingly recall Beckett’s characters in his late stage and television plays. Towards the end of his trip, Beckett ordered several of Barlach’s plays. He also endeavoured to purchase the monograph Zeichnungen von Ernst Barlach, which had been published in November 1935 by Piper but banned and confi scated in March 1936.²⁵ With the help of Eggers-Kestner, Beckett tried to obtain the book from the publisher Reinhard Piper directly. Yet when Beckett phoned Piper, the reply was negative, and, moreover, uttered in a

‘very terrifi ed tone’ (letter to Günter Albrecht, 30 March 1937). Piper, who had been censored by Goebbels on several occasions, expressed his fear that Beckett would be searched at the border.