Nico Rost (1896–1967)

"Goethe in Dachau" is a fascinating journal of survival through literature and intellectual work. Nico Rost spent almost a year in the Dachau concentration camp up to the end of WWII, and decided to document his everyday reflections on literature and the discussions he had with other intellectuals in a journal that gave him the strength to forget, if only for brief moments, the misery in which he and so many were in Dachau.

There are many reasons why this book is so important. First of all, it's an impressive effort. Analyzing Goethe, Schiller, and many other authors is not something you'd imagine someone doing in a camp while starving, seeing dozens of people dying on a daily basis, and surviving continuous bombing. Secondly, this book makes justice to the many communists, anarchists, and anti-fascists that resisted the Nazis and ended up dying in camps. History focuses mostly in the atrocities against Jews and gypsies, but little is written about the uncountable number of leftists who ended up dying for standing up to fascism -- this book, however, gives us an idea of how many ended up in Dachau and other camps, if only those that Rost was familiar with. Finally, although a concentration camp journal would be the last place where you'd expect it, this is an amazingly rich source of references to German and Dutch authors and works of literature, of all sorts, but specially those who wrote with a socially critical eye.

There's a lot more that one could say about this wonderful book, but I think you should just read it instead.… (more)