My early years: world adventure in service

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My Early Years: World Adventures in Service (in the original: My Early Life: A Roving Commission ) is the title of a memoir by the British statesman Sir Winston Churchill , published in 1930 , which is an autobiography of his youth.

The events and vicissitudes described in My Early Years stretched over a period of almost thirty-four years, beginning with the birth of the future statesman in Blenheim Palace , the castle of his grandfather, the 7th Duke of Marlborough, in 1874, until he was married to him At the time, the young politician Churchill and Clementine Hozier advanced to the position of Minister of Commerce of the British Kingdom in 1908, to whom the book is also dedicated ( "I married in 1908 and from then on lived wonderfully and happily" ).

The first publication of the work as a book in October 1930 by Thornton Butterworth in London - with an initial print run of 5750 copies, which was followed by three further editions of one 2500 and two 1500 copies by the end of the year due to the great demand - took place between 30 A "serialized" publication of the book, section by section, in The News Chronicle preceded August 8th and September 20th .

Origin and effect of the work

Churchill wrote most of My Early Years in 1930, a year after the overthrow of the second Baldwin administration , of which he was Chancellor of the Exchequer . Two motives are usually cited as motives for Churchill's decision to publish his youthful memories: On the one hand, Churchill's need to find a replacement job after the termination of his official duties in order to fill his - as an unemployed opposition politician - relatively extensive free time. And secondly, the pressure on the politician, who has always lived on a large scale, to supplement his parliamentary salaries through other sources of income after he got into financial difficulties during the global economic crisis. In addition, the vanity of the undisputed self-confident Churchill may have been another reason to deal with oneself and to dedicate a book to it.

Churchill's book - which the author sent countless well-known personalities such as Stanley Baldwin, Austen Chamberlain , Ramsay MacDonald and the former German Emperor, Wilhelm II - received a consistently positive response from the critics and was translated into numerous languages, especially after 1945.

In addition to the exciting plot itself, most of the reviewers also particularly emphasized the linguistic mastery of Churchill's text, which takes into account the gradual intellectual development of his young self by gradually maturing: while Churchill used his childish self in the first chapter can be spoken in a very naive, childlike, way that tries to understand the world, the maturation of the adolescent and the young adult is shown by the fact that the retrospective Churchill uses an increasingly mature language in describing these phases of life, the older he is becomes the young man described. For example, in its review of the book, the Times wrote: “Mr. Churchill's reviewer would require to be almost as skilled a writer as he is himself […] in order to give an adequate notion of the charm and briskness of this book " , while The Daily Sketch judged: " If you want to understand how Mr. Winston Churchill is his versatile, incalculable self you cannot do better than read his brilliant autobiographical sketch. "

Churchill's former head of cabinet Baldwin praised his former Treasury Secretary's book: “It is a remarkable piece of work that I have read with pleasure. I kept thinking: my goodness - or something like that - that's good. " And Churchill's biographer Knut Hagberg , looking at world adventures in the ministry, said when he looked through Churchill's entire literary works: " Perhaps there is no more enchanting description in all of world literature of a young man and his path to the stars and the charm of adventure. ” And Churchill's biographer William Manchester adds in his book The Last Lion that My Early Years was part of the Swedish Nobel Prize Committee when discussing whether Churchill's literary oeuvre was worthy of the Nobel Prize in Literature was characterized as "charming" but played no role in the decision to award Churchill the award.

Adaptations

Churchill's memory book was used by British director Richard Attenborough as a template for the 1972 film The Young Lion .

expenditure

  • My early years. World adventure on duty. Munich 1965.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Knut Hagberg: Winston Churchill. Zurich 1945, p. 58.