Cirrus@Austlit

Brian Matthews provides the background to Dymphna Clark's presence in Berlin at the time of Kristallnacht. He details the political climate in her parent's home, including their views on the Third Reich and Hitler's ascendancy in Germany, and traces the early stages of Manning Clark's writing career with particular reference to Manning Clark's appropriation of Clark's account of Kristallnacht. Matthews's view is that: 'it seems to me reasonable to propose that Kristallnacht, for Dymphna, for [Manning] Clark, became the focal point of an intense and intricate complexity of personal forces, conflicts and anxieties so threaded through their own relationship, so ramified by Dymphna's relationship with her parents, as to transcend even the strange phenomenon of Clark's having appropriated it forty years on'.