The complex history of the journals of Ruth Andreas-Friedrich (1901-1977), the German proto-feminist, author, magazine editor/publisher/journalist and WWII resistance fighter, has in recent years generated a rich body of scholarship in both German and English language criticism. A conspicuous gap in this scholarship concerns the English translation of the journals, quickly “tricked” into English by June Barrows Mussey (1910-1985) in ways that have remained pretty much unexamined. And yet, Friedrich’s most famous publication, Der Schattenmann: Tagebuchaufzeichnungen, 1938-45 was actually born in translation, appearing in Mussey’s versioning for Henry Holt Co. some months before the journal debuted in its original German. This essay delves into the void, reconstructing what we can (and cannot) know about the transmission and translation of Friedrich’s Berlin Underground. Further, the essay analyzes key features of the Henry Holt edition’s presentation and marketing for an Anglo-American audience to propose that the English editions of Friedrich’s journal provide a fascinating example of translation in the broader sense of the transformation of cultural forms, completing a “domesticating” process only begun by J.B. Mussey’s interlingual translation.

This recently published Dutch book is meant to reassess the ‘Vietnamese struggle for independence and the West,’ in the words of its subtitle. As such, the quote from journalist Neil Sheehan with which Rimko van der Maar precedes his work can be seen as a statement of intent: ‘There are some events that can be understood only with the perspective of time. The war in Vietnam is one’ (7). Exactly what the book hopes to understand better about, as Van der Maar readily admits, a war that is one of ‘the most researched and described military conflict[s] of the Twentieth Century,’ is then formulated clearly in the introduction, where the author writes that he wants to ‘present the war from a Vietnamese perspective’ (16). Not, to be clear, how the war was experienced by the Vietnamese, but rather how Vietnamese individuals and institutions sought to influence Western decision-making and public opinion. As such, this is very much a book on the ‘force and meaning of information, propaganda and diplomacy’ (16).

Grant Rodwell’s memoir charts his journey from an impoverished childhood in the Oberon timber region of New South Wales, Australia to a distinguished career as teacher, principal, and multiple-doctorate scholar. What emerges is not simply a personal story but a rich contribution to life-writing scholarship, offering an intimate view into a working-class, rural childhood, which included institutionalised prejudice, and the enduring psychological consequences of adolescent trauma. It is equally a portrait of Australian educational history during a period of profound structural and cultural transformation. The book is well placed in the prolific emerging literature on the topic of biographical approaches in education, which utilizes life stories and individual histories to understand the link between learning and identity and their combined societal impact.

This essay is a reflection on the process of creating a Cloak for Courage in the Anthropocene, from early ideas to the finished garment. We describe our collaborative practice and methodology as the composite eco-poet, kin’d & kin’d, challenged by the work of Donna Haraway to reassess our relationship with the many-more-than-human. We show how US poet Jorie Graham influenced our movement from a focus on hope to a commitment to courage at this time of eco-crisis, and how our concern with reciprocity, beauty and uncertainty as working principles led to the particular form that the Cloak took. Drawing on the lyric essay that we originally wrote about the process, ‘The evolution of a thought about courage in the Anthropocene’, we also illuminate the set of writing practices that would ‘consecrate’ 47 wild objects to make them into amulets for courage for the Cloak’s pockets. We discuss how being-with, thinking-with and listening to, the wild objects became crucial methods of inquiry and developing respect. We conclude that the whole experience of conceiving of and making the Cloak was an experiment with uncertainty, and that ultimately, we can only point towards what we might call courage in this era.

‘The Fence’ weaves a critical reading of the author’s unusual first day in the UK in 1987 with a reflection on borders and discrimination applied to both humans and birds. The contingency and instability of borders create a relative and precarious status when it comes to human and nonhuman animals; this shifting position is subject to socio-economics, history, legislation and the politics of representation that contribute to the production of othering. Alongside societal contingencies, this work emphasises the role of individual agency which can affect and override the outcomes predicated by these structural limitations.

In Emergency in Transit, Eleanor Paynter redefines contemporary Mediterranean migration, challenging dominant narratives, especially in Italy, that portray it as a sudden, unmanageable “crisis.” The book identifies the Italian government's response to migration as a problem of short-sightedness, since it approaches migration as an emergency situation. The weight of this critique comes from its focus on witness testimonies, a methodological commitment that is also a call to action. Paynter believes that changing the language around migration will change the dominant narrative that migration is a crisis. The book highlights how people held “in transit” respond to and resist this narrative and its government apparatus by analyzing the testimonies and cultural productions of migrants themselves. Drawing on oral histories, ethnography, and analysis of literature, film, and visual art published and set in Italy, Paynter contributes to critical refugee studies and postcolonial Italian studies, offering a call to reimagine mobility and belonging within the migrant experience. One of Paynter’s most compelling contributions is the use of migrants’ memoirs as witness literature, which challenges the erasures of official narratives and asserts migrants’ right to narrate their own histories.

The diplomatic memoir is a peculiar subgenre of life writing. Diplomats are trained to be circumspect and occasionally economical with the truth, yet their writing is meant, in principle, to be candid, honest, and thorough. Diplomatic memoirists continue serving their profession but invert diplomatic practice, and the subgenre, in enacting a private, professional language in public with their memoirs. This essay examines the memoirs of four diplomats – an American, Englishman, Pakistani, and Turk – alongside their lives, families, style, and literary as well as historical significance.

The article addresses Central European historical experiences of the twentieth century manifesting in the fates of Sándor Márai, Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig. Entangled in the speeding wheel of the modern history, the three writers experienced excessive historical discontinuities (wars, revolutions, dictatorships) which they conceptualized in terms of Epicureanism and Stoicism. To a great extent mythicized Epicurean ‘lightness of being,’ carefree travelling, journalistic openness coexist with the Stoic inward diaristic safeguarding of the self from the historical burden in their texts. While in the Epicurean approach to life, individual is a master of his own fate realizing positive freedom, the centripetal Stoic worldview entails a search of negative freedom from the overwhelming historical fate and a withdrawal to inner (diaristic) self as the only anchor in volatile times. Moreover, the three writers’ historical experiences shaped their double displacement. Whereas its spatial dimension (exilic nomadism) made their self-identifications oscillate between homo politicus and homo poeticus, its temporal aspect – in the article’s foreground – implied the need to narratively inscribe one’s self within a meaningful order of time reconfigured in personal writing.

What happens to our understanding of human life when we attribute agency to the artifacts that represent it? Anna Poletti places this intellectually sophisticated yet provocative question at the center of her book Stories of the Self: Life Writing after the Book (New York University Press, 2020). With this question in mind, she invites readers to reconsider the materiality of life narration in the modern world.

In ‘Queer Tango’, Dylan Jonas Stone reflects on learning the art of tango and its dancing movements, alternating between steps into the past and into the present, in ways reflecting the memory work of diary writing, reading and re-reading. For Dylan, the intimacy of tango expresses - and sometimes confounds - expectations around sexualities.