On 6 October 1936, Samuel Beckett sat somewhere in Hamburg and wrote a sentence that could not have been more different from the bleak, static silences for which he would one day become famous. "They'll need to fight soon (or burst)," he recorded in his diary, after watching the feverish enthusiasm that Adolf Hitler's rallying speeches produced in ordinary German citizens on the street. It was a diagnosis, delivered with the quiet precision of a scientist who has already accepted a terrible conclusion. Those six small notebooks, which Beckett compiled over a six-month journey through approximately thirty German towns and cities — among them Berlin, Dresden, and Munich — have been published for the first time by the Frankfurt house Suhrkamp, released on 20 August this year.

Their appearance has quietly dismantled a critical assumption that had settled around Beckett's reputation like dust: the idea that the future Nobel laureate, who received the prize in 1969, travelled through the collapsing Weimar world in a state of literary self-absorption, indifferent to the political catastrophe unfolding around him. The notebooks reveal something far more alert and far more unsettling. Beckett catalogued the visual grammar of the Nazi movement with the eye of an anthropologist — the ubiquitous "Hitler coat," the liturgical phrases of the regime, a list of ideological keywords that repelled him even as he copied them dutifully into his pages. He mocked the salute by extending the wrong arm, a private act of defiance so small as to be almost invisible, and yet so deliberate as to be unmistakable.

Mark Nixon, co-editor of the notebooks and a professor of Beckett studies at the University of Reading, has suggested that the danger of confiscation forced Beckett into oblique expression: the rebellion is there, encoded rather than declared.