I Shall Bear Witness: The Diaries Of Victor Klemperer 1933-41

Product Information

April 25, 1933 The focus of the Hitlerite movement is undoubtedly the Jewish cause. I fail to understand why on their agenda this item is so central. It means their ultimate ruin. But probably our ruin as well. Source of original German text: Victor Klemperer, Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzen. Tagebücher 1933-1941. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1995, pp. 16-17.

On Tuesday at the new Universum cinema on Prager Strasse. Beside me a soldier of the Reichswehr, a mere boy, and his not very attractive girl. It was the evening before the boycott announcement. Conversation during an Alsberg advertisement. He: "One really shouldn't go to a Jew to shop." She: "But it's so terribly cheap." He: "Then it's bad and doesn't last." She, reflective, quite matter-of-fact, without the least pathos: "No, really, it's just as good and lasts just as long, really just like in Christian shops—and so much cheaper." He falls silent. When Hitler, Hindenburg, etc. appeared, he clapped enthusiastically. Later, during the utterly American jazz band film, clearly with a touch of Yiddish at points, he clapped even more enthusiastically. I wouldn't greet you. That's why I stopped you to ask, How are you?" I was moved by his attitude. I answered and added, "I was told that you, Herr Rector, are a top-Nazi now." He: "Oh my God, one can never That same year, and subsequently, Klemperer was so dismayed with the spread of antisemitism, even among those who professed to be against the Nazis, that he from time to time entertained the possibility of fleeing to the US. A later diary entry—for April 10, 1940—records other problems with emigration: "Meeting with the emigration adviser of the Jewish Community, result less than zero: You really must get out—we see no possibility. American-Jewish committees support only observant Jews." But in the end his connection to his fatherland was too strong, even after Kristallnacht in November 1938, and the outbreak of war. During the pogrom later in November 1938 their house was searched by Nazis who found Klemperer's saber from World War I—he was arrested briefly and released. [8] By this time he had come to concede that "No one can take my Germanness away from me, but my nationalism and patriotism are gone forever." [9] This release can be attached to the fact that he had a German wife. Although the day after his arrest he wrote to his brother Georg asking for assistance in leaving Germany, in the end he did not do so. Anne Frank will always remain the best starting point for understanding the Holocaust, because her voice speaks directly to children across the decades. The historical value of the Klemperer diaries is, however, incomparably greater. Its wealth of detail, its sensitivity to linguistic and social nuance, its political insight and awareness, its humane intelligence—these qualities leave all other such efforts in the shade. Like Samuel Pepys in his time, like the Duc de Saint Simon or James Boswell in theirs, Klemperer evokes the atmosphere of Nazi Germany so well that the stench fills one’s nostrils. And all the while, the horror of his story is illuminated by shafts of dry, bitter wit.See: Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933–39 Harper Perennial, 1998 ISBN 978-0-06-092878-0 and Nazi Germany and the Jews: the Years of Destruction, 1939–45 Harper Perennial, 2008 ISBN 978-0-06-093048-6 Hitler's rise to power is described as the result of a chaotic mixture of nihilism and masochism, a rebellion against authority and at the same time a neurotic submission to it. "It is amazing," Klemperer notes soon after His trained philologist's ear was tuned to every changing inflection in the corrupted language of totalitarianism. There are frequent entries in the diary headlined "L.T.I." (Lingua Tertii Imperii, Klemperer's term The young Klemperer had sought to make a career first as a writer and then as a journalist, in neither case with much success. In the years before World War I, having married the highly musical and non-Jewish Eva Schlemmer, he decided to start again, and threw himself into academic studies under the guidance of the leading Romance scholar Karl Vossler. Like many patriotic German Jews, Klemperer, already then in his thirties, volunteered for and fought in the Great War. But despite his record of service, and despite the several excellent books on French literature he would publish in the ensuing decades, he never rose higher than a chair at the Technical Academy in Dresden, a second-class post for a first-class mind.

passing mood, every incident in what he called "the sheer fairy-tale horror" of life under the Nazi tyranny: "Observe, study, record everything that happens -- tomorrow it'll look different, tomorrow it will feel differently. The proclamation and injunction of the boycott committee decrees "Religion is immaterial," only race matters. If, in the case of the owners of a business, the husband is Jewish, the wife Christian or the other way around, then the business counts as Jewish.

Success!

A closer reading of the Klemperer diaries would cure the chancellor—and not only the chancellor—of any illusions about what wartime Germans knew or wanted concerning the Jews. But no such closer reading is likely to take place, and for reasons the diaries themselves make clear. Truly to immerse oneself in this modern classic is to find oneself wondering, and not for the first time, whether the mentality of national self-deception and willful ignorance that it so brilliantly depicts will ever, like the ideology of National Socialism, fade into history. n 1995, Aufbau-Verlag, a Berlin publisher once best known for the cheap editions of the German classics it threw on the East German market, brought out a two-volume This was not Klemperer’s attitude; indeed, he saw clearly that such passivity was at the root of the German problem. In January 1947, two years after the end of the war, he wrote to a former pupil, Hans Hirche, who had appealed to him for help. Hirche had been a major in the Wehrmacht and was now having difficulty finding a civilian job. Klemperer is blunt Hirche’s word of honor that he was innocent of atrocities, even if accepted, does not exonerate him of guilt: “You and all the others must have known what crazy criminals you were serving, what unthinkable cruelties you stood up for and made possible by your loyalty.” To the claim, “we didn’t know,” Klemperer rejoins: “Hadn’t one of you read Hitler’s Mein Kampf, where all that was later carried out had been planned in advance with shameless openness? And were all these murders, all these crimes, wherever one looked, only evident to us—I do not only mean the Jews, but all the persecuted?” Language Does Not Lie [5] ( La langue ne ment pas), a 2003 documentary film based on Klemperer's book, directed by Stan Neumann January 1, 1935– language tertii imperii: Lutze's New Year message to the SA...Our "fanatical will" twice in a non-pejorative sense. Emphasis on believing without understanding. (1) "fanatical engagement of the SA," (2) "fanatical sense of commitment."

been an alliance of "grand capitalists" and "grand militarists" working together to suppress the "working class." From Klemperer's diaries, Nazism emerges as a movement of dour, petit-bourgeois Archie Klemperer was the son of a small-town Reform rabbi. In the assimilationist parlance of the time, his father was known as a Landprediger (country preacher). Klemperer had four brothers -- one a prominent lawyer, another a famous surgeon called as a consultant The events of March 21 were shown, including passages from speeches, Hindenburg's proclamation laborious, his breath short, the voice of a very old man who is physically near the end. Hitler declaiming like a pastor. Goebbels looks uncommonly Jewish [ . . . ]. We saw a torchlight procession and a great deal of marching awakening Germany. Also Danzig with the swastika flag. [ . . . ] This imposing giant of a man was prey to depression, and at one point had placed himself in the care of his cousin, Georg Klemperer. Georg had run a large Berlin hospital and, as one of Germany’s most eminent physicians, had traveled to the Soviet Union to minister to the dying Lenin. Georg, who would become an emigré himself, had a younger brother, Victor, who remained behind in Germany to pursue a promising academic career as a professor of Romance languages in Dresden. Otto had become acquainted with his cousin Victor when they were both students in Berlin, but thereafter lost touch. As he moved from success to success, the conductor neither was aware of nor, as far as is known, cared about the increasingly desperate plight of a comparatively obscure relation left behind in Germany.But let's return to Klemperer's diary. It reminded me, once again, about the same old truth that people often fall under the yoke of manmade organizations and socio-political structures. In Klemperer's case, that was the Nazi state that was an oppressor and killer. The Nazi party was a soulless organization, using on the one hand rationalistic mechanisms of bureaucracy and government, and following on the other hand, an insane, totally detached from the reality ideology. (In Solzhenitsyn, the monster was the Soviet Russia and the Communist party.) The diary genre has specific qualities that distinguish it from all other literary forms. It is the most honest genre, especially if the diarist had no intention to disclose his thoughts and feelings to the public. The reader of a diary always appraises the intimacy and spontaneity of the writer, and joins a journey in which both author and reader do not know how it would end.