Throughout the 1930s, Irish-born mid-century literary icon Samuel Beckett was a frequent visitor to Germany, spending time in Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, and Kassel, home of his first true love interest, Ruth Margaret “Peggy” Sinclair, and the source of inspiration for his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (not published in its entirety until 1992, three years after Beckett’s death). Beckett’s German diaries recount his visit in 1936 to Hamburg in search of avant-garde art—which by then had of course been deemed “degenerate.” German museums no longer had the likes of Otto Dix, Oskar Kokoschka, or Max Liebermann on view, but there were luckily still enough private galleries trafficking in censored art, such as the one run by Hildebrand Gurlitt.