German Autumn

In the aftermath of the Second World War, when the international press portrayed the ruins of Germany as a just punishment, Stig Dagerman poured a clairvoyant compassion over the defeated, questioning the victors' perspective and their right to humiliate a broken people. 

German Autumn (1947),  a report commissioned by the Swedish newspaper Expressen, far from painting a homogeneous picture, is a vivid gallery of the exploited and starving, victims of a war that was not their own, but also of those who strove not only to survive, but to profit from the misery of others.

Stig Dagerman, for whom journalism was «the art of arriving late as soon as possible», delved into the ruins of a disoriented Germany, immersed in its guilt and blocked by the occupying forces, and refused the hypocrisy of demanding political contrition from the survivors.

The result is a work of journalism with the permanence of great literature, in an objective and empathetic style that would inspire the press to come.