The Diary of Anna Haag: A Transformation in a War Diary

1) It read in the handwritten entry of August 20, 1942: “What a swamp we are in. Why did Morick live with his passionate poems about love. Goethe, Schiller, Hugo Wolff, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms! What a crowd! Shameless boys rule the German people. ” This passage is missing on the date mentioned in the hard copy now published; Instead, Anna Haag put it first, modified it dramatically, and gave it the date May 11, 1940 (the day after the start of the German war in Germany). Aggression against France): “Why did Mozart, Beethoven, Goethe and invent their works, if we know today nothing but killing and destruction?”

2) On the manuscript printed on January 20, 1944 it was written: “… I can no longer look at a soldier’s face without asking myself:“ Is he… maybe there too? “Besides, (…) when Lydice was destroyed, was he in Orador? In Amsterdam?” Anna Haag added this clip afterwards, but did not notice the stark chronological inconsistency: Those hiding in Amsterdam’s secret annex, including Anne Frank, they were betrayed on August 4, 1944; The SS massacres in Lydice and Ourador occurred on June 10, 1942 and June 10, 1944 respectively, and the publisher and editor did not discover the discrepancy at first, but should be corrected in the new edition, according to Hollis.

3) Another example showing how Anna Hagg changed her notes from time to time: The walls of the small room in which she found refuge for four months (in a village) and slept, according to the original manuscript, were “hanging with angels, pious sayings, Christ and military images.” In the print edition edited after 1945, the entry reads: “Hanging with angels, biblical sayings, generals, Bismarck, Hitler, Christ.” It was clear that Anna Haag’s intention after 1945 was to transform the small room in which she tested herself into a typical German room for “the Third Reich” in the figurative sense, as well as filling it with pictures that were not available in her outdoor bedroom.

The list goes on. Above all, if the examples provided show that Hagg wrote her handwritten material for the printed copies so freely – so freely that it is often difficult to speak of an original diary here – then some passages from her memories book from 1968 prove that Stuttgart’s original home was Completely. She tends to portray her actions better at a later time.

Do not ban publishing

In one diary she described an alleged experience from 1942: I personally got up on the tram and made a spot for a Jewish woman with a Star of David. Reaction: “People are angry” – “Goodenknecht” – shouting – “Get out!” Daniel Goldhagen quoted this scene in his book “Hitler’s Willing Executors.” But this process is neither in the original diary nor in the printed version. He saw him as “a friend of.” There he described it in a slightly different way. March 4, 1942: After a “Jew with a Star” boarded the tram, a heated argument arose between two passengers, one of whom referred to the other as a “Jewish servant”.

Other examples of the self-published book Memory Hague from 1968 can also be cited, where differences in content and history in the original diaries and typographical manuscripts raise questions. A careful edition can handle this.