Description

This important work appears here in English for the first time in nearly a century, it is one of the most moving testaments we have from a writer in prison.

ERNST TOLLER (1893-1939)
was one of Germany’s best known playwrights

in the first half of the twentieth century, and his works were produced all over the world. Many of his plays were composed in the five years he spent in solitary confinement as a political prisoner in the early twenties. During that time his only friends were a pair of swallows who flew in through the bars of his single high window and made a nest in his cell. He grew to feel that he was a soul-mate of the little birds and their young, and that they were all one family. Eventually the prison guards discovered the swallows, and waged war on them, destroying their nests (every time one was destroyed the birds tried to build a new one). This poignant, heart-breaking account of Toller’s loneliness, of the swallows’ lives, and of their tragic fate, is told in the form of a long, sustained and impassioned poem. It is one of the best loved of works of German poetry of the last century.

“If idylls are permitted within prison walls, this was an idyll. But all good things come to an end. Autumn comes and the birds migrate south, leaving Toller to wait for them to return the following spring. Circumstances conspire to prevent a reunion, leading to the creation of The Swallow Book. It was published in 1924, thanks only to some very creative thinking to smuggle it past the authorities. . .And Toller’s swallows continue to nest and are, in their centenary year, thanks to Eglantyne Books, once more perching on the shelves of English speakers.”

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