When the lights go out Stories from the Third Reich

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When the lights go out Tales from the Third Reich is the German title of the original edition The Lights Go Down. Middletown - Nazi version , the second “political textbook” by Erika Mann after Ten Million Children . It was published in 1940 by the London publisher Secker & Warburg and by Farrar & Rinehart in New York. Originally it was Our Nazi Town , Our City Nazi mean. It was written in German and Maurice Samuel , a friend of Erika and Klaus Mann , translated . The illustrations are by John O'Hara Cosgrave, II. Erika Mann describes everyday life in a small German town in Nazi Germany in the mid to late 1930s . Most of the manuscript was written in Switzerland in the summer and autumn of 1939; After the outbreak of World War II , Erika Mann completed it in the USA.

All stories are documented; Erika Mann researched refugees and emigrants . The German first edition, when the lights go out , first published in 2005, is a reverse translation from English by Ernst Georg-Richter, as the original German version is considered lost. The Erika Mann biographer Irmela von der Lühe wrote the epilogue.

content

The stories are set in ten chapters in an unnamed Catholic university town in southern Germany . The focus is on workers and employees, a manufacturer as well as a university professor, the chief doctor of the university clinic, a pastor or the chief of police. The SA and Hitler Youth march in the streets , Jewish homes and businesses are destroyed. The screeching voice of Adolf Hitler can be heard on the radio. Terror lurks behind bourgeoisie, fear has taken root. There is no focus on criminals, but neither are any heroes of the resistance . It is normal people, little fellow travelers - like the mass of Germans who made Hitler's terror possible. But Erika Mann also tells of upright Germans who recognized the National Socialist madness and resisted it.

From the afterword by Irmela von der Lühe

[...] All the stories from Erika Mann's cycle work with the antithesis of common sense and National Socialist barbarism. Much of everyday National Socialist life is ridiculous or grotesque: the abundance of conflicting regulations, the obviously incompetent but loyal representatives; the reasons for going to jail. Stupidity, and with it barbarism , came to power with Hitler. He himself and his followers are at best bad actors, dope comedians - and yet at the same time, in their primitive brutality, a threat to civilization as a whole. [...]

Literature and source

  • Erika Mann: When the lights go out. Stories from the Third Reich , with an afterword by Irmela von der Lühe. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2006, ISBN 3-49924413-6
  • Erika Mann: The Lights Go Down . Translation by Maurice Samuel, illustrations by John O'Hara Cosgrave II. New York, Farrar & Rinehart 1940