THE VIEW FROM 1933: ERNST TOLLER'S EINE JUGEND IN DEUTSCHLAND AS EXILE LITERATURE – ON THE FINAL AMENDMENTS BEFORE PUBLICATION OF THE BOOK EDITION

Abstract

Until now it has in the main only been possible to identify the changes that Toller made to Eine Jugend in Deutschland during his exile by comparing the two book editions. This showed that Toller's edits were restricted to the paratexts. The two complete text versions that have recently been rediscovered – one typescript in the Bavarian State Library in Munich and one copy in the Berner Tagwacht, which represent stages of the text that are older than the book version – make it possible for the first time to verify larger edits that Toller introduced for the first book edition. This article shows that the changes made by Toller after the publication of the first book edition, which, as Wolfgang Frühwald asserted, shifted ‘die Akzente von der literarisch-ästhetischen Ebene stärker auf die kämpferisch-propagandistische’, continue a tendency that can in fact be dated back to the months or even weeks immediately before the publication of the book. It is not only the second edition of Eine Jugend in Deutschland that can be identified as a ‘book of exile’, as researchers maintained because of the absence of complete preliminary versions, but also the first edition; the ‘Blick 1933’ characterises both the introduction and the main body of the work.