I Shall Bear Witness: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1942-45

I Will Bear Witness #1

by Victor Klemperer

A publishing sensation in Germany (where they have sold over 100,000 copies at £45), the publication of Victor Klemperer's diaries brings to light one of the most extraordinary documents of the Nazi period. The son of a rabbi, Klemperer was by 1933 a professor of languages in Dresden. Over the next decade he, like other German Jews, lost his job, his house and many of his friends, even his cat, as Jews were not allowed to own pets. He remained loyal to his country, determined not to emigrate, and convinced that each successive Nazi act against the Jews must be the last. Saved for much of the war from the Holocaust by his marriage to a gentile, he was able to escape in the aftermath of the Allied bombing of Dresden and survived the remaining months of the war in hiding. Throughout, Klemperer kept a diary, for a Jew in Nazi Germany a daring act in itself. Shocking and moving by turns, it is a remarkable and important document, as powerful and astonishing in its way as Anne Frank's classic. The second volume of two, this covers the period from the beginnings of the Holocaust to the end of the war, telling the story of Klemperer's increasing isolation, his near miraculous survival, his awareness of the development of the growing Holocaust as friends and associates disappeared, and his narrow escapes from deportation and the Dresden firebombing in 1945.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Holocaust, Memoir, Biography, World War II, Germany

553 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Victor Klemperer (9 October 1881 – 11 February 1960) worked as a commercial apprentice, a journalist and eventually a Professor of Literature, specialising in the French Enlightenment at the Technische Universität Dresden. His diaries detailing his life under successive German states -the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic- were published in 1995. His recollections on the Third Reich have since become standard sources; extensively quoted by Saul Friedlander, Michael Burleigh and Richard J. Evans.

Reviews

[Nika]

One simply has to get through this time with decency .

This diary of Victor Klemperer spans the period from 1933 to 1941. The narrative starts with the Nazis coming to power and ends when WWII is in full swing.
Klemperer was a German Jew, son of a rabbi. He converted to Protestantism, served in the army during WWI, and won a distinction.
Victor greatly appreciated German culture and, as it is noted in the preface, ‘if Klemperer was subject to fits of despair at the behavior of “seventy-nine and a half million out of eighty million Germans,” he never rejected his German identity.’

Professor Klemperer had been teaching students Romance Languages until he was dismissed due to the Nazi legislation enacted against “Non-Aryans.”
However, Klemperer was lucky, if you will forgive me this term, to receive a small pension from the state. The fact that he had served in the German army led to this favorable outcome.
He was married to an “Aryan” woman, which would also help him on several occasions.

The diarist was directly affected by most of the restrictive laws. Step-by-step basic rights were taken from him. Victor was forbidden from going to cafes, riding at the front of the tram, and using public libraries. He was forced to wear a special sign whenever he went outside.
He and his wife had to leave their private house for an apartment in the so-called ‘Jewish house.’
Great support came from his wife Eva who was always by his side. She took upon herself all the shopping when the new order of the Jewish badge popped up. Thus, Victor was mostly spared from the abuse on the streets.
Klemperer was constantly haunted by the need to save money to make ends meet. He was often plagued by heart and eye trouble. Housekeeping required his time and energy. It was a bit strange to read his frequent complaints about the need to wash up, cook, and clean. Eva, with her fragile health, could not cope with all these chores alone. So we see mundane details against a backdrop of a horrible tragedy.

Despite all these misfortunes, Victor and his spouse Eva managed at times to treat themselves to simple little joys. They went to the cinema and cafes, met friends, and took evening strolls until this was prohibited. Reading aloud was among their pastimes.

I do not want to think more than a day ahead; but the dreadful, wretched weight on my soul is there every morning. And my situation worsens every day.

His records show that the German nation seems to have been divided in their opinion about what was happening in the country.
Conflicting evidence made it extremely difficult for the Klemperers to come up with a finalized conclusion as to whether Hitler’s regime would fall tomorrow or last for years. And they were by no means alone in that.
The situation in which the diarist and his wife found themselves day after day resembled a violent roller coaster ride.

Klemperer’s descriptions testify to how that gruesome story played out.
The political decisions of the Nazi government were not always acclaimed by the population. But most of those who did not agree often kept their feelings to themselves out of fear, conformism, or self-interest.

One third said Yes out of fear, one third out of intoxication, one third out of fear and intoxication.

Klemperer points out that many ordinary Germans sympathize with his plight, express their support, or aid the couple in one way or another.
The diaries register Klemperer’s positive interactions with “Aryans” to whom the tyranny of the state was disgusting and who rejected Hitler’s immoderate anti-Semitism.
For example, he wrote in February 1934:

'On Saturday we went for supper to the “respectable” Köhlers in Waltherstrasse. It does one good, that these completely “Aryan” people from quite different circles of society—the son a probationary grammar school teacher, the father a railway inspector—hold on to their vehement hatred of the regime and to their belief that it must fall in the foreseeable future.
On Sunday we were at the Blumenfelds for evening coffee (as the only guests). Here also (fluctuating moods!) they were no longer quite so convinced of the everlasting durability of the present state of things. Because there is a grinding of teeth throughout so many strata, professions, confessions.—But inwardly I am disheartened again and again. And my strength, all my physical and mental strength is increasingly exhausted. My work is completely at a standstill; simply preparing the Monday lecture in time is a martyrdom. So I welcome the fact that the semester is already ending on the twenty-fourth of the month. Admittedly it is ending because the students have to report for labor service, because, in fact, the regime sees education, scholarship, enlightenment as its real enemies and attacks them accordingly.'

Klemperer did not want to live abroad. He spoke German, he felt German, and, against all odds, he hoped that Hitler was only a temporary delusion. Moreover, the Nazi government made emigration overly toilsome for those who wanted to leave. In addition to all the paperwork, valuable assets were to be confiscated, etc.
However, a number of German Jews managed to emigrate, some of them left the Third Reich for Palestine.
Klemperer, it must be said, had always been rather skeptical of this prospect. In his view, “The Jewish communities in Germany today are all extremely inclined to Zionism; I shall go along with that just as little as I do with National Socialism or with Bolshevism. Liberal and German forever.”

Klemperer survived the Holocaust and the war. He received his deportation notice shortly before the massive Allied bombing raid of Dresden took place. In the aftermath, Klemperer managed to escape.
After the end of WWII, he would resume his academic career in his hometown.
There were several moments when his life might have taken a different path. Klemperer might have emigrated or he might have wound up in a concentration camp.
However, he was able not to leave Germany and survive.

Victor Klemperer would publish The Language of the Third Reich - the book based on his diary notes - in which he studied the language of the Third Reich, changes in it, and how these linguistic modifications might have affected culture and history.
One of his observations concerns the use of superlatives.

Lightning war [Blitzkrieg], final battle—superlative words. War and battle are no longer enough.

He committed to paper what he witnessed without trying to impress or influence anyone’s opinion. His diaries are considered a reliable picture of life in the Third Reich.

I would recommend this book to those who are interested in the history of the period.

[William2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

An astonishing document that's unlike anything else I know that might fit under the heading of Nazi period memoirs. The perspective it provides — that of Jewish academic Victor Klemperer and his "Aryan" wife living in Dresden during a time of state-sponsored genocide —beggars description. Moreover, it's very well written. Do read both volumes.

[Lewis Weinstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

UPDATE 6/10/17 ...

As part of my research in preparation for writing the next section of the sequel to A Flood of Evil, I read Klemperer's diary from 1936-38. Here are a few observations on the major events of the day ...

Jul 1938 ... antisemitism is again greatly increased … Jewish assets must be reported … Jews are banned from certain trades … yellow visitor's cards needed for baths … the Academic Society for Research into Jewry is meeting in Munich … the opening of art exhibitions in Munich and elsewhere recite their familiar anti-Jewish slogans

... Aug 1938 ... for weeks now, intensified Jew-baiting and drastic new measures all the time … extreme tension everywhere … fear of war everywhere

The entries, however, contain not a single word about the horrors of Kristallnacht which took place on November 9, 1938.

EXCEPT ... Several days after the events, however, he makes this cryptic and sarcastic entry ... "in April, when in wise anticipation of the Grunspan murder and its atonement ..."

This refers to the murder of a German diplomat in Paris by a Polish Jew, an event which was used by the Nazis as the excuse to unleash a nationwide pogrom. Klemperer is referring to the extensive preparations, months before November, for what was later falsely described as a spontaneous reaction.

*** PRIOR COMMENTS ...

It is one thing to read the history of horrific events, but even greatly written history cannot match the immediacy of a contemporaneous diary. The pain, fear, anxiety, and frustration come through with a raw clarity that is unnerving.

So far I have read only 26 pages, through the entry of July 28, 1933, but already I have several ideas I will look to incorporate into my characters in my novel-in-progress. The diary continues through the end of the war in 1945. An incomparable resource.

*** it is a disgrace, which gets worse with every day that passes … there's not a sound (of protest?) from anyone … everyone's keeping his head down, Jewry (SPD?) most of all and their democratic press … who will have the majority on March 5? Will the terror be tolerated and for how long? It is impossible to make predictions.

*** the defeat in 1918 did not depress me as greatly as the present state of affairs … it is shocking how day after day naked acts of violence, breaches of the law, barbaric opinions appear quite undisguised as official decree … the Socialist papers are permanently banned

*** no one dares write a letter, no one dares make a telephone call, we visit one another and weigh up our chances ... since telephone calls are unsafe, and since everyone is depressed, we constantly have nerve-racking morning or afternoon visits … catastrophe is imminent … there is no salvation … Eva's nerves are completely gone … the same conversations everywhere … fragments of madness in which we are unceasingly immersed

*** for the moment I am still safe … but as someone on the gallows, who has a rope around his neck, is safe … at any moment a new "law" can kick away the steps on which I'm standing and then I'm hanging

*** Hitler on a film at the cinema … clenched fists, twisted face, wild bawling … on January 30 they were still laughing at me … they won't be laughing anymore

***

MORE TO FOLLOW ...

[Meaghan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this diary fascinating and believe it's an indispensable work of history -- almost one-of-a-kind. You see a lot of diaries and memoirs from the Holocaust/WW2 years, but not much from the mid- to late-1930s and the rise of Hitler. Reading Klemperer's diary, which covers January 1933 through December 1941, you can see how the fascist state gradually chipped away at the rights of Jews, and the Holocaust was accomplished in little baby steps. I can summarize it like this:

Jewish civil servants were thrown out of their jobs. Klemperer, a college professor, was forced into early retirement and didn't get a veteran's pension. Non-Jewish maids were prohibited from working in Jewish households. First Aryan civil servants, then all Aryans were forbidden to associate with Jews. Jews had to fill out an inventory of all their assets. Everyone was either leaving the country or trying to get out; many of Klemperer's Jewish friends left for places as far away as South America. Kristallnacht happened; the synagogues burned. Jews were no longer permitted to drive. War started, and with it, rations: Jews got smaller rations than Aryans. People who were half Jewish or less could serve in the military, but had limited opportunities for promotion. Jews were no longer allowed to use the library reading room, then they were forbidden to check out library books. There was an earlier curfew for Jews, and they were only allowed to go grocery shopping at certain times of the day. Many stores had "No Jews Allowed" signs. Jews were no longer allowed to live in their own homes; Klemperer and his wife had to move into a special "Jew house" and rent out their home to a tenant selected by the Nazis. Klemperer committed a minor breach of blackout regulations and served an eight-day jail sentence in solitary confinement; the same offense, committed by an Aryan, would probably have resulted in a 20-mark fine. As the book ended, Klemperer had just gotten out of jail and his typewriter was confiscated; Jews were no longer permitted to have them. And the war has three and a half years left to go!

Yet Klemperer was extremely fortunate in a lot of ways. He was very assimilated -- in fact, he had converted to Christianity, after a fashion -- and had a lot of Aryan friends, and most of them remained his friends. His siblings provided much-needed financial support. And his marriage to an Aryan woman would eventually save his life; he was one of the few hundred German Jews who never had to go into hiding and was never deported to a concentration camp.

All this he faithfully records, along with the minutae of daily life: his pet cat, building and maintaining his house, learning to drive and buying a lemon that breaks every week, constant dental appointments and general hypochondria, dinner parties, reading, scholarship, sibling rivalry, the weather, etc etc etc.

One thing I took note of was, at least from what Klemperer saw, perhaps half the German population sympathized with the Jews. He writes about meeting ardent Nazis and people who try to make his life miserable because of his Jewishness, but more often he notes expressions of sympathy from strangers, shopkeepers slipping forbidden food into his basket, that sort of thing. He even wrote about a "Star Club," a group of Aryans who went around giving friendly greetings to Jews on the street who wore the yellow star, just to show them not everyone hated them. This sort of thing flatly contradicts the theses of a lot of scholars who write books with titles like Hitler's Willing Executioners. The problem was, at least in Klemperer's case, most of the people who sympathized with him did so in a very quiet, unproductive way: they were either too apathetic or too scared to take real action and provide serious, tangible aid. As some wise person once said, all that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

Victor Klemperer wrote two other diaries, one up to 1945 and the other about the postwar years in Communist East Germany. I hope they are as good as this one; I plan to read them both as soon as I can get my hands on them.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Victor Klemperer was a professor of classical languages in Dresden. He lost his position and sense of security soon after Hitler took power. Although he had converted to Protestantism in 1911, he was classified a Jew by the Nazis as Dresden’s Jewish community steadily dwindled because of deportations to Lodz, Auschwitz, and Theresienstadt. Since his wife, Eva, was a “full-blooded Aryan” they were kept safe from deportation until notified to prepare to leave the city on February 13, 1945. That night the infamous firebombing of Dresden that killed thousands took place. Ironically, it turned out to be a reprieve for Klemperer and Eva. In the chaos that ensued, he removed the yellow stars from his clothing before they both joined the flood of refugees streaming to the west and south of Germany as the war came to a close. By some miracle, his diaries, which he stored in the shed of a friend on the outskirts of Dresden, survived. They may well be among the best, most insightful documents that describe what life was like at “ground level” in Nazi Germany. This first translated volume covers 1933-1941.

Klemperer understood the personal threats Nazism posed for him and others like him. He recognized in April 1933 that he was “now…at the mercy of an arbitrary power.” Within two years the threats became more visceral: “I truly expect that one day our little house will be set alight and I shall be beaten to death.” Less than three months after Hitler came to power, he was “almost used to the condition of being without rights”. He noted how official propaganda became “the opposite of a democratic press [, a] disciplined press.”

Compounding their dread was the abandonment and marginalization of their friends, colleagues, and neighbors. “No one dares write...[b]ut everywhere [is] complete helplessness, cowardice, fear.” Yet there was also a perverse acceptance and support for Hitler he noted in May 1936: “The majority of the people is content, a small group accepts Hitler as the lesser evil, no one really wants to be rid of him.” Two years later, he was “ever more convinced that Hitler truly speaks for more or less all Germans.” As bad as many might have thought the Nazis were, many believed “the Communists and that would be even worse!” leading him to conclude “[t]he saddest thing about it is that everyone now reckons only with extreme governments: NSDAP or Communism—as if there were nothing in between.” As a veteran of WWI, Klemperer was a German first, but the daily indignities led him to conclude, “No one can take my Germanness away from me, but my nationalism and patriotism are gone forever.”

As early as December 31, 1933, Klemperer anticipated Hannah Arendt’s thesis in The Origins of Totalitarianism to “equate National Socialism and Communism: both are materialistic and tyrannical, both disregard and negate the freedom of the spirit and the individual.” Being an academic who lost his position at the university, he understood that “…they do not want anyone to study; intellect, scholarship are the enemies.” By 1941 he was more succinct: “Always and everywhere: National Socialism does not want to know, to think, only believe…The main thing for tyrannies of any kind is the suppression of the urge to ask questions.”

Another difficulty for Klemperer was that he himself did not consider himself to be a Jew. Indeed, although he would have liked to emigrate [as many of his family members and colleagues did: Otto Klemperer was one of the great conductors of the 20th century and Otto's son, Werner, went on to have a successful acting career, most notably Colonel Klink on the 60s television series Hogan's Heroes], he was very critical of Zionists, who he felt were “are just as offensive as the Nazis” and “exchange[d] nationalism and narrowness for nationalism and narrowness.” His strong opinions caused further isolation; even among the Jewish community, “No one will help us. To the Jews I am apostate.” Feelings of isolation intensified in his rare communications with friends and family who emigrated. His nephew, who settled in Chicago, “has no idea of the difficulties here. Obtain a visitor’s visa immediately—how easy he thinks it is!” Instead, he and Eva continued to “go on living fatalistically.”

Regardless of his deep convictions, however, Klemperer and Eva were still subject to every legal and social restriction that applied to all Jews. Not only was his profession denied him, but so was, over time, his ability to learn and read. “In the morning [of October 9, 1936] at the library I was told gently, that as a non-Aryan I was no longer allowed to use the reading room. They will let me take everything home or give it to me in the catalog room, but an official ban has been issued for the reading room.” On December 3, 1938, shortly after Kristallnacht, Klemperer was banned from “using the library.” The man who informed him “was distressed beyond words, I had to calm him. He stroked my hand the whole time, he could not hold back the tears,” leading Klemperer to write, “But these few, sympathizing and in despair, are isolated, and they too are afraid” because “Aryan friends of the Jews are always treated worse than Jews themselves.” Other ramifications after Kristallnacht included a prohibition for Jews to go to movie theaters, have driver’s licenses, and increases in taxes, which made it more difficult for them to emigrate, and “all Jewish doctors [were] struck from the Medical Register…so they can starve.” After the invasion of Poland, restrictions increased including limits on withdrawals from bank accounts and curfews for Jews after 8 pm.

Klemperer’s contemporaneous writing debunks notions that average Germans were unaware of the atrocities committed in their nation’s name. For example, word of the building of the new Buchenwald concentration camp in became common knowledge; “no one comes back from there a second time, between ten and twenty people die every day anyway.” He notes the November 8, 1939 assassination attempt on Hitler at the Munich Bürgerbräu, had him “reckoning with arrest, concentration camp, perhaps also the bullet” since “we know the culprits: England and behind it Jewry.” In August 1941 he wrote, “[t]here is widespread talk now of the killing of the mentally ill in the asylums,” which turned out to be one of the few times Nazi policies were changed due to public outcry.

Popular knowledge of the reality of Nazi Germany was also underscored in anecdotes and urban legends implying more than they said, especially since “dissemination carries the threat of prison: A man in Berlin takes his wife to the hospital so she can give birth. A picture of Christ hangs over the bed. The man: ‘Nurse, that picture must go, I don’t want the Jewboy to be the first thing by child sees.’ The nurse: She herself could not do anything about it, she will report it. In the evening he gets a telegram from the doctor: ‘You have a son. The picture did not need to be removed, the child is blind.’” Another story he recorded on September 7, 1941: “A married couple…learn that all four of their sons have been killed in Russia. The father hangs himself, the mother hurls the picture of Hitler out of the window into the courtyard Half an hour later she is arrested (‘taken away’).”

Two instances of his prescience are noteworthy. He noted after the 1936 Olympics of “…an absurd overestimation of sport; the honor of the nation depends on whether a fellow citizen can jump four inches higher than all the rest.” And when he is briefly imprisoned for not having followed rules during a blackout, Klemperer has much time to reflect and realizes, “It is honorable to be imprisoned now, it will be advantageous to any future character reference.” It was a hopeful prediction, one that wasn't quite true in most of Germany, East or West, until well after Klemperer's own death in 1960.

Occasionally Klemperer found fleeting moments of optimism and grace, as he wrote on New Year’s Eve 1938, of “not [having] reached the last circle of hell, for uncertainty is not the worst thing, because in uncertainty there is still hope.” In his few public forays, Klemperer sometimes had quiet conversations with old friends and acquaintances on street cars only to revert to silence when “a man with a Party badge got on…Such incidents always give me hope for a quarter of an hour. No more.” Prior to Christmas 1939, many of his neighbors committed small acts of kindness. A grocery store owner “slips me one bar of chocolate after another, and the butcher writes on the back of a receipt: For Christmas we have put by a tongue for you.” Some even gave secret gifts of books, “an expression of courage and a profession of opposition. It is a most significant symptom of the general mood. In return I gave her Germinal …” These acts of kindness prompted him to write on New Year’s Eve 1939, “I am now convinced that National Socialism will collapse in the coming year. Perhaps we shall perish with it—but it will certainly end, and with it, one way or another, the terror.” He often “encounter[s] much sympathy, people help me out, but fearfully, of course.”

What little optimism he had was quashed by the swift military success Germany has in Holland, Belgium, and France. “Historical development takes more time that an individual human being has. And I fear Hitler’s halo of invincibility.” By the end of May 1940 he notes “Everybody in the [Jewish] house absolutely certain of German victory.” Even when wounded soldiers return home for treatment, cries of “It’s the Jews fault!” only deepen despair. Widespread rumors of England’s capitulation were also taken as fact until the air raids began. In the beginning of 1941, Klemperer realizes that the good news from the front must be false based on what he sees around him; the quality and quantity of meat is severely curtailed, ersatz coffee replaces the real thing, restrictions on Jews multiply—higher taxes, confiscation of typewriters, stricter emigration rules, prohibitions of half-Jews from serving on the front lines, milk delivery for Jews becomes illegal, increased police checks at Jewish homes, bans on smoking for Jews—everything belies official propaganda.

Klemperer considered September 19, 1941 to be the worst day of life, when he was required to wear the yellow Star of David, even though he wrote in 1938 that “[f]or half a day I thought, now one must find the courage for suicide.” Perhaps more than anything, it brought back the words he had written in 1933, “I must live here and die here.” As hard as his life had been since 1933, he could not have imagined that things would get even worse as he would describe the events of 1942-1945.

[William2 · Rating 4 out of 5]

An astonishing document that's unlike anything else I know that might fit under the heading of Nazi period memoirs. The perspective it provides — that of a Jewish academic and his "Aryan" wife living in Dresden during a time of state-sponsored racism — is unique. Moreover, it's very well written. Do read both volumes.

[notgettingenough]

I wrote this a few years ago, but nothing's changed, not in my part of the world, anyway. It was around the time I was reading Klemperer's book on the language of the third reich, and interactions with friends online prompted it.

In Australia and no doubt elsewhere in the world, this sequence is happening.

First we have terror.

Next we have anti-terror.

And new on the line is terror of anti-terror, or anti-anti-terror, such as a glut of journalistic articles telling us why the Australian Government's new anti-terror laws are 1984 and the instigation of the thing we should really be terrified of. You can see an example here.

This is the spin we all create: the Nazis, Mark (my friend) who quotes the Nazis, Ed (my friend) and I guess, me, much as I'd like to think I'm if not above, then at least apart from, spin.

Mark the other day quoted a highranking Nazi talking about the effect of propaganda, in this case, the value of creating fear, the implication being that this is what is happening in Australia at the moment.

Göring: the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

He followed this up by linking to one of the many media articles talking about the Orwellian world into which Australia has now descended and which is the true enemy, the one of which we should be truly terrified.

As it happens, my reading at the moment has me firmly entrenched in the 1930s and WWII, a sickening period to be reliving, but also an educational one, especially in view of IS. Mark referred to IS in terms of fascism the other day, but as Klemperer would be quick to point out, there is a massive difference between fascism and Nazism. Clearly we would have to say, if we observe this difference, that IS is not fascist, but something far more horrific, and the comparison to Nazism seems more accurate to me.

Because of this reading, I happened to come across something said by a highranking Nazi too and it is this:

Himmler: The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect.

The fact is, propaganda is one thing. It can't hurt, it might help, and no doubt the Nazis were masters of utilising it for their cause. But terror is like this. It is getting beaten to death in the street. It is being forced into slavery - and not just any old slavery, but slavery where you are starved to death and treated in unspeakable ways before being killed in equally unspeakable ways. It is not only about groups of Jews being forced naked into rooms where they are gassed to death, but about the people who watched this happen and enjoyed it. Ordinary people who got their jollies like this. It is about being a French person in occupied France in the resistance and what that entailed. If one German was killed by you, then ten French prisoners were killed. When that didn't help it became more and more French for one German. It is about being in so-called Free France but being forced into slavery for the Germans. If you were not Jewish, that is. If you were Jewish, some other appalling fate. Terror in the IS area and in other parts of the world where fundamentalist Islam invades is like this. It is fucking terrifying. That is what Australia is fighting against at the moment.

I don't have the skills, nor the presumption to present a true picture of the sheer terror that was life in Europe in this period if you weren't willing to be one of the terrorisers and maybe even if you were. But surely it can't be too hard to put yourself in this world and get an idea of it.

This is not a world I want to be part of. Probably most Germans would have thought they didn't want to be part of it either, given the choice, and even after some of them, to their surprise perhaps, discovered that it was fun watching groups of naked human beings being gassed to death. It happened, and it happened because people let it happen. At which point do we step in? Having seen when and how this process took place in WWII, I find it hard to believe it isn't right to step in earlier rather than later.

The bottom line is, however, the terror is real. It isn't something the PM of Australia has created because you don't like what he's done to the Barrier Reef or women's shelters. And if he - and others - have attempted to deal with this through anti-terror, ie creating fear of terror, one can hardly blame him. It is hard to believe that it is necessary even. Fear of terror? Count me in. Fighting against terror? Count me in. Hoping that this doesn't turn into something Orwellian. Count me in. Do I put this last? Yep. It's a no-brainer.

In the 1930s everybody outside Germany let what was happening continue. They watched Hitler happen. They watched ordinary Germans become Nazis. They watched Germans kill Jews - 'hey, as long as it's just Jews and homosexuals and people like that, let's not worry about it.' They let Germany start brutally taking over other countries. 'Hey, it's not our country, let's hope for the best.' Nobody ever wanted to do anything much about it until they perceived their own country to be under threat. World War Two was not the only horrifying consequence of this willingness to hope for the best.

Oh, it's only Kurds. It's only women. It's only homosexuals. And you know. These guys aren't so awful really, they are maybe a bit crazy. Hey, let's send in some therapists. Yeah. Let's see if that works. And yeah, maybe if we leave them alone, you know. They'll leave us alone. Well, hell's bells, they said they would leave other countries alone. Okay, we'll give them half of Czechoslovakia. God damn. They've taken the other half too.

My nightmares are half IS and half Nazi. They are both real.

[Audrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reviews of this diary consistently fail to account for the richness of its contents. No one should "rate" a Holocaust memoir, but my decision to do so reflects my impression of my experience with Klemperer's words as a witness to a place, time, and life at times oddly similar and dissimilar to my own.

Klemperer's diary is unique. As an academic, he knows he lives in troubled and interesting times. He leaves the "facts" of events in Nazi Germany to historians and focuses on documenting his lived experience and responses to his changing world. As a WWI veteran, a professor, and husband of an Aryan woman, his circumstances and a great deal of Providence, allow him to both remain in Germany (a suburb of Dresden) and survive many of his contemporaries despite his own advanced years.

Klemperer's prose provides the reader with more than a window. He might as well be sitting in your room speaking to you. His emotions are palpable eighty years later, and his thoughts almost answer your own questions as soon as they're formed. He knew as he wrote that his actions would have consequences (and prompt serious question)--for more than himself--in the years to come and he is unapologetic and stubborn. He will bear witness, so help him God.

Beyond the obvious reason to read this book as a unique account of Nazi Germany, there are important secondary reasons. As an academic, he struggles within the academy-- courses, curriculum, colleagues, petty squabbles, publishing. Timeless. Despite being deprived of a position and seeming impossible odds, Klemperer drags himself out of bed each day and writes, reads, and thinks. Even in a cell, uncertain of seeing his loved ones again, he argues with himself over the success of Hitler's regime in light of known history, considers material for his own work, and creates a puzzle for he and his wife's 37th anniversary (the first ever spent apart).

His heart, soul, and mind are his own. His will to stay and chronicle his life, a choice he makes mainly on his own. His words, carefully worded, are his alone. At the same point, he makes concerted and specific mention of the many kindnesses--surprising to us and him--day after day, year after year--that conspire to keep him alive. As a result, we bear witness to the strength not only of his will, but the compassion and love of humankind in the midst of darkness.

[Steph (loves water) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing. Quite possibly the most important book to come out of WW2. This man's first hand account of what went on in Germany during the rise of the National Socialists and the affect upon his family, neighbors and friends is an insight into a society gone mad.

Although many Germans were anti-Nazi, the National Socialists came into power because they were seen as the lesser of the two evils, when given a choice between that and Communism. As Professor Klemperer observes throughout this diary, the ideologies are similiar, but most people did not see it that way. The paralyzing fear of day to day living gave rise to an apathy experienced across the country, and he mostly found himself talking to people who could not, or would not, listen.

I found this work to be outstanding. Daily recital of the changes and abuses suffered by the Jews over the years 1933-1941 are interspersed with incredible insight and occasional flashes of brilliance. The novella "Cell 89" particularily impressed me as an awakening of the human soul.

I am so glad that this book survived destruction and am amazed that it was discovered in the 1990s. Everyone should read this book. The lessons and insights in this book could apply to the current situation in the United States. It could also serve as a warning against the dangers of mass apathy.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Eva does not like to hear me talking about Hitler; I myself am as intensively concerned with him as a cancer researcher is with cancer.”

This second translated volume of Victor Klemperer’s diaries, covers the years 1942-1945, which spans the period when the “Final Solution” was implemented through the months after WWII. In the first volume, Klemperer’s despair continued about the fate of him and his wife Eva continued to grow. His diary entries document the ever increasing number of indignities and threats the dwindling Jewish community faced. The instances of kindness they experienced were always tempered by fear. Oddly, Klemperer, on the one hand, makes clear that the Jewish community had intimate knowledge about the atrocities taking place in the concentration camps and in, as Timothy Snyder called them, the Bloodlands. Yet he wrote “the worst measures against [Jews] are concealed from the Aryans. Even people who are close to the Jews are not aware of the petty bullying or the brutal murders.”

The list of the daily challenges the German Jewish community faced was never ending. They were forbidden from using street cars on Sundays, from entering train stations, and from “engaging Aryan tradesmen ‘for personal needs.’” They were “not allowed to stand in queues” and were forced to surrender personal items like hair scissors and combs. Jewish schools were shut down, which Klemperer called “An intellectual death sentence, enforced illiteracy.” A year later he noted “one of the most wicked deeds of the Nazi Party, that banned all instruction for Jewish children. Very quickly, even the most innocent mistake could cost one’s life. An elderly Jewish woman is overheard telling a friend about the great fortune of getting extra fish from a sympathetic vendor, is denounced, has her house searched, and is sent to a concentration camp, from “[w]hich she will certainly not survive. For a half a pound of fish.” Another woman was sent to a camp when she was caught taking the streetcar to a doctor’s office instead of work.

There were also glimpses of humanity. When Klemperer was assigned to a road building detail, he described how the foremen and supervisors “were very humane and anti-Nazi. ‘Don’t say that we treated you well, not at the Community either, rather say we were bad; otherwise we’ll be in trouble.’ — ‘Don’t know knock yourself out.’ — ‘Look, I can’t tell you, “Work more slowly,” you have to know that yourself,’ etc., etc.” A neighbor “reports the most vehement Communist remarks by the tram drivers. There appears to be a particular hotbed of dissatisfaction here.” When a neighbor brings him and Eva “a little pot of primroses” it is “a heroic deed, which can put one in a concentration camp and so cost one’s life. Typical petit bourgeois heroism.” A grocer who gives him a bit extra asks him to “[c]ome back toward the evening, I’ll give you more. During the day—I supply the SA here, I have to be careful.” Giving anything to Jews who were to be “evacuated” could lead to “being shot by the police.”

However, even non-Jews became annoyed with the plight of Jews. One of his friends “was told: ‘Why do you not all hang yourselves?’ and they showed him who to make a noose.” A person passing him on the streets asks, “Why are you still alive, you rogue?!” Soon the open violence against Jews becomes so common that “[t]here is nothing spontaneous about about it, everything is methodically organized and regulated, it is ‘cultivated’ cruelty, and it happens hypocritically and mendaciously in the name of culture. No one is murdered here.”

In early 1942, he describes how friends and acquaintances commit suicide after repeated harassment and threats of being sent to concentration camps which “is now evidently identical with a death sentence.” Even the news of death camps spread quickly, “In the last few days, I heard Auschwitz (or something like it)…mentioned as the most dreadful concentration camp. Work in a mine, death within a few days.” Information traveled far, as with Babi Yar: “Ghastly mass murders of Jews in Kiev. The heads of small children smashed against walls, thousands of men, women, adolescents shot down in a great heap, a hillock blown up, and the mass of bodies buried under the exploding earth.” Following the murder of Heydrich in Prague, he learns of “house searches of the Czech population. Wherever weapons were found, the whole family, man, woman and children were exterminated.” Even stories from as far away as Romania, where Jews were forced to dig their own graves before being shot made their way to Dresden. Stories of people never reaching the camps, of “being gassed in cattle trucks during the journey” are widespread.

But through it all, Klemperer clung to his German identity. When he argued with two Jewish friends who believed “the absolute anti-Semitism of all classes in Germany, inborn, universal, ineradicable; I deny it, my arguments more resolute that what I believe, and find support here and there.” He was consistent in his criticisms of Zionism. “Study of Herzel’s Zionist writings. Very great affinity with Hitlerism. Except the Herzl dodges the blood definition. To him a nation is a ‘historical group, which recognizably belongs together and has a common enemy.’ (Very weak-kneed definition.)” His reading of “Herzl’s Zionist Writings.” reminded him “[t]his is Hitler’s reasoning, sometimes precisely his words, his fanaticism.” Yet he still found “Herzl obnoxious but interesting.”

His diary entry for July 21, 1944, the day after the Stauffenberg’s failed assassination attempt, did not inspire hope. He wonders if it will become “remote to” him, “as the Bürgerbräu affair of ‘39 is remote to me now.” Two days later the wife of a friend “says Hitler must not be allowed to die, he can be used to earn money by taking him around the world in a cage—one dollar to look at him, two dollars to spit on him, three dollars to smack him in the mug.”

He did take notice, however, of ever changing attitudes. While some became even more fanatical in their support of Hitler, others began making public displays that once would have led directly to jail. He was told of a soldier who returned from the front, upon asking an acquaintance why he was still there: “‘Because I am in a mixed marriage.’ — ‘Well, that’s decent; but I’ve seen such awful things in Poland, such awful things! It will have to be paid for.’ This very loudly, while other people were listening.” A few days later a passing worker “said loudly: ‘Chin up! The scoundrels will soon be finished!’” A joke soon spread that the air-raid shelter signs LSR (Luftschutzraum) actually meant “Lernt schnell Russisch” (Learn Russian quickly).

Following the chaos of the Dresden bombing, Klemperer removed all the stars of David from is clothes as he and Eva walked among the crowds in the direction of the American frontline. They made their way through Bavaria, sleeping in barns and occasionally with old friends and relatives of friends. When the war was over, he and Eva wandered in search of normalcy only to realize that they wanted to go home. On June 10, 1945 they set foot in Dresden ready to rebuild their lives as Germans.

As Klemperer was fleeing to the south, he found his assertiveness again. Less than two weeks before capitulation, a woman who was housing them, who was still a Nazi sympathizer, remarked, after all that had happened, that "Liberalism is to blame for everything bad." His response was for the ages: "I must explain to her: A liberal is someone who stands by the sentence: In my father's house there many rooms. A scholar who does not agree with that sentence is no scholar.” Perhaps this is what I will remember most when I reflect on Klemperer’s diaries in the future. It is also a fitting battle cry for today as we see the U.S. continue to veer toward institutionalized fascism.

[Maren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Schon vor Jahren gelesen, hatte es aber bisher vergessen, einzustellen. Sollte Schullektüre sein! Na gut, zu umfangreich, aber zumindest in Auszügen.

[Steve Cox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most surprising was how quickly after 1933 that the vise began to tighten on Klemperer and his fellow Jews. Second most surprising is how orderly and law-abiding it all was, in a twisted sense. Over the next 12 years, the Jews' rights and privileges were reduced one by one, as Klemperer lost lost his prestigious university job, his house, his food rations, his rights to use Dresden's transportation, etc. Then when almost all Jewish rights were gone and the deportation orders began to be enforced, there was still a pecking order which was by and large upheld by the local authorities. Klemperer watched the majority of his fellow Jews go to the camps, with little illusion as to what awaited them there. He avoided deportation longer than the rest because his wife was an Aryan, and he was a WWI veteran. Still he was next on the list when the Allied bombing of Dresden occurred and he and his wife escaped in the chaos.

Klemperer comes across as a fairly priggish cuss; you'll tire of his self-regard and his constant references to the work on his "dix-huitieme", an academic study of 18th century French thought. But that makes him a real person, dealing with the tedium and trials of daily life under a regime that he watched turn from menacing to murderous, trying to make sense of it all.

[Ana · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is incredibly hard to finish, even if you're armed with enthusiasm about the subject. These are the diaries of a literature professor of Dresden, a Jew married with an Arian woman during the years of the Nazi regime coming into full power. It is, at times, extremely boring, because across 8 years of writing, some pages are just mundane details about his and his wife's life under the ever-growing hatefulness of the regime. However - that is the exact point of interest of this book. It gives you details on the opinions of people living right at that time, their daily struggles, their hopes and dreams, what they ate, what they fed their cats, how they committed suicide, how they went on walks and so on and so forth. It is tedious at times, but worth it for the overall picture. The one most interesting thing of it all is Klemperer's focus on Lingua Tertii Imperii (Language of the Third Reich), where it shows the beginnings of him realizing how important language and the use of it was to maintaining the Nazi regime in place. After he collected this information, he went on to write a book specifically about that, which I am hoping to read soon.

[Mark Colenutt · Rating 5 out of 5]

We all know of Anne Frank's tragic testimony to people's inhumanity when they are possessed by a vainglorious impression of themselves. Superiority is clearly defined by how humanely you treat the vulnerable and not how easily you decide to crush the defenceless.

Victor Klemperer's two-volume diaries are simply the most significant publication in recent years in any historical discipline. While we are amazed by Frank's maturity in her observation and style and above all her resilience, Klemperer is the better writer. This is not solely due to his more mature years but also to the fact that he was a professor of literature at Dresden University. His writing style reflects his academic training as does his perceptive understanding of the times he was living through.

What led to the Second World War was the gradual mutation of German society from a modern, democratic society to one prepared to first accept a dictator and then follow him blindly down the road to European domination. What was it then that enabled this to occur at grass roots level? Klemperer gives us fundamental insights into this question while documenting the acerbic hate towards the Jews and the daily atmosphere inside a country taken over by a military mindset. He also paints a surprising picture of a German social kaleidoscope split between those who are openly aggressive alongside those who are secretively compassionate.

Victor Klemperer had no alternative but to bear witness and leave as his last will and testament an accurate document of what he and others were subjected to the moment society went to the wall and civilised acceptance of others' differences was exchanged for unremitting intolerance and accusation.

The diaries are an integral part of clarifying the extent to which the ordinary German was responsible for Hitler's policies and the resultant Holocaust. The poignant two-volume memoirs are now standard texts in this field of study.

Therefore, for anyone with a serious interest in Nazi Germany this is a must-read whether they be an armchair academic or Oxbridge-Ivy League aspiring Don.

[Hal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful. So much has been said and written about the 1933-45 period and Nazi Germany, but Klemperer's firsthand diary account of his experience during the regime as a "Jew" (he converted to protestantism as a young man, but the Nazis thought in terms of race/ethnicity, not religion) in Dresden is still riveting and surprising in many ways! Klemperer did not emigrate, due to a mix of hope that the Nazi government wouldn't last, attachment to his home, poor health of his wife and a lack of options; and he was not deported, as he was living with his non-jewish German wife. So he got a rare perspective as a persecuted person from within Germany over the whole period.

His account of daily life shows how officially sanctioned discrimination (e.g. Jews not being allowed to ride the tramway) is mixed with arbitrary bullying (e.g. a Gestapo officer ordering Klemperer to get down from the tramway even though he had a special permit for work) and wanton brutality and physical violence, all before a background of constant fear and danger.

How much could he know or guess about the genocide of the jews? Early after the deportations started (November 1941), Klemperer noted "catastrophic news about the jewish deportations to Poland and Russia", in March 1942 he notes that a deportation to a concentration camp is now a de facto death sentence, as "the death of the deported follows a few days later". In October 1944, he wrote that he assumed "that six to seven million jews have been slaughtered (more precisely: shot and gassed [sic!])". All this from a man who, through the Nazi restrictions, quickly lost access to radio, newspapers and public life! This is an indication of how much could be known about the Nazi killings if one cared to listen, ask the questions and talk to those concerned. But Klemperer often writes of interactions with "aryans" who are completely oblivious to the sanctions against jews, and genuinely surprised to hear that he would be in danger of death for even the smallest transgressions (such as forgetting to switch off the lights after the special curfew, for which he ends up spending more than a week in prison).

Even though Klemperer, as a language professor, was very aware of the ways in which the Nazis twisted words and concepts and collected instances of what he called Language Tertii Imperii (=language of the third Reich), I cannot help but notice how he himself starts using and thinking in these classifications:

For instance, he often refers to his wife as aryan and himself as jewish, or uses the official word "evacuation" rather than deportation. Another example: In the beginning, the Nazis bothered to send back the ashes of the victims they killed in the concentration camps, in a small urn to the family, with a short note that they had been shot and killed during an "attempt to escape" (NB: The Nazis, who ended up killing millions in the camps, bothered to send the ashes and a note of death to the bereaved! This was early days, to be sure, but still a surprising nod to normality in the midst of the madness.); needless to say, this is a bogus pretense that never fools Klemperer nor anyone. Still, the word comes to be identical to death (or killing, or murder), so that he says in a later part, after engaging in a dangerous conversation that could lead to his deportation:

Ausreichend für KZ und Fluchtversuch. (Sufficient for concentration camp and attempt to escape)

Finally, interesting to see how dire the economic situation was in Germany throughout the Nazi regime, even before the war, even during the years of successful Nazi campaigns; there was lack and loss of currency value and rationing early on that affected everyone (of course, jews and other declared enemies of the Nazis got it extra hard). An important reality check for all right-wing revisionists who today glorify the Nazi time as one of success and plenty.

The publication history is unexpected: Klemperer was aware of his role as a comtemporary witness and de facto historian and clung to writing his diary despite the constant danger he put himself into (death for writing against the regime, basically), as well as his wife and the non-jewish friend who hid the manuscript for them. Many times in his daily notes he agonizes whether this huge risk is really worth it. And yet, after the war when he regained his position as respected professor, he ironically decided against publishing his 1933-45 diary... Dixit Klemperer:

Meine [Tagebuch]-Lektüre ergibt immer entschiedener, daß LTI [Lingua Tertii Imperii] zur Publikation wesentlich geeigneter als das eigentliche [Tagebuch]. Es ist unförmig, es belastet die Juden, es wäre auch nicht in Einklang zu bringen mit der jetzt gültigen Opinio, es wäre auch indiskret.
(My diary re-reading reinforces my conviction that LTI [Lingua Tertii Imperii] is much more suitable for publication tha the actual diary. It is unshaped, it puts a strain on [or: incriminate?] the jews, it wouldn't be compatible with the opinions prevalent today, it would also be indiscrete.)

And so it was that his unfiltered report was made available to the general public only fifty years after the end of the war, in 1995, to massive success.

My only gripe is with the ebook edition, which doesn't highlight nor link the endnotes in the main text (so if I come across a name or abbreviation that I don't know, I have to highlight it, search for it in the entire book and check if there's a hit at the very end with an endnote...). That is just a poor usage of the format.

[Ian Beardsell · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I first started reading the diaries of Victor Klemperer, I wondered how to keep track of all the various acquaintances and family members he is mentioning. An appendix of who-is-who would be extremely helpful, yet it did not take away any of the impact reading his personal accounts had for me. As many reviews already state, this is an incredible document because it simply records the thoughts, fears, suspicions, rumours, that are circulating around an average German's life as he experiences life under Naziism. Although it mentions the big headline news events, the assumption of power by Hitler, the death of President Von Hindenburg, the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws, it does not delve into them as a journalistic news account or history text; instead the diary records Klemperer's gut reactions, the discussions he has with his wife about the incidents, the sense of fear and helplessness of not knowing what comes next. That in itself is what gives these diaries their impact...

[Pat · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that finally made me understand why the Jews didn't violently revolt.

[Czytam Sercem · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cenne świadectwo codzienności Żydów niemieckich w III Rzeszy

[Stefanie Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Primary sources like this are so valuable to the historical record. Followers of my reviews are probably sick of me saying that, but I am a firm believer in it. As a historian, first hand accounts provide a lot of context into events and time periods. I appreciate the bravery and the forethought of the author of this diary. I hope that the current generation is documenting current events for the future generations to pick apart, because there has really been a lot of content to record since I was born. It's been a busy 30 years.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating and in-depth journey of the lives of a married couple; the husband, a Jew converted to Christianity, and his Gentile wife. In Nazi Germany, a converted Jew was still a Jew, and so the couple suffered extreme hardship and persecution because of his Jewish heritage. Incredibly detailed---the diary form made you feel as if you were there with them, suffering every indignity every day for seven years and more. Shocking how slowly and deceptively the Nazis gradually took from them every thing they had ever worked for---jobs, status, savings, pension, home, cats, friends, food, privacy. Unbelievable how educated people could have been so fooled into thining that "any day now" they were going to be saved and all the Nazi foolishness would be exposed and ended. REally, an unbelievable read, and only tedious in some of the author's lamentations and the work he was doing on his own personal book.

[Ali Esbati · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ett storartat historiskt dokument. Det är en sällsam upplevelse att vardagligt och omständligt följa med genom åren. Inte minst de till synes meningslösa men systematiska inskränkningarna av judars rättigheter. Från förbud att låna på biblioteket till förbud att köpa glass. Beskrivningen av de politiska omslagen och av överlevnadsstrategierna när allt är livsfarligt. De i efterhand oerhört viktiga uppgifterna om hur mycket man faktiskt anade och visste om dödslägren. När anteckningarna börjar 1933 är Klemperer antisionist och mycket stark anhängare av idén om Tyskland som upphöjd kulturnation, med nazismen som en främmande anomali. Med tiden växer tvivlet om hur tyska nazismen och judehatet egentligen är. Som borgerligt liberal är Klemperer också tydligt antibolsjevik. Det modifieras delvis, även om han in i det sista har sina reservationer mot ryssarna och också skriver ner berättelser om ryska övergrepp i det apokalyptiska landskap de färdas genom efter kollapsen 1945.

[Sunny · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a diary style book about the 1933-41 years of victor klemperers life. he was jewish but had converted to protestantism. he was married to a german aryan wife. he was still prosceuted and gradually ostracized through all the rules the nasties bought in gradually against the jews. things really kicked off around krystallnacht. this is better than anne franks diaries. he was a lecturer at university. it talks of some of the key events that happens in the buildup to the second world war in german and dresden but it also and equally importantly mentions the daily detailed discrimination jews faced. there is a wealth of detail in this book that is certainly worth reading. not as hard hitting as Wiesels "night", or Borowski's "this way to the gas", but still shocking in the way life was squeexzed out of the Jews in Germany and surrounding countries.

[Lysergius · Rating 4 out of 5]

This second volume of Victor Klemperer's diary covers the period from the beginning of the Holocaust to the end of the war, telling the story of the Klemperer's increasing isolation, their growing awareness of the Holocaust as friends and associates disappear. Finally chronicling their near miraculous survival as the war ends and they make their way back from Munich to Dresden.

[Christine Parker · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a social and historic document it is extremely interesting. Unfortunately I found Kemperers are not easy people to like and I nearly gave up after 1933 but I urge anyone thinking of doing the same to persist it is so absorbing.

[Rick Slane · Rating 2 out of 5]

must wade thru mundane details for the nuggets-I may revisit this at some time. There is a vol.2 1941-1945 that may be more exciting.

[Britta Böhler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reread

[Thomas J. Hubschman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I Will Bear Witness, 1933-1941 & 1942-1945
A Diary of the Nazi Years
By Victor Klemperer

Victor Klemperer was a professor of French literature, specializing in the Enlightenment, employed at the Technical University of Dresden at the time the Nazis came to power in 1933. At that point in his career he already had a few scholarly works in print and was planning another, a project on the 18th century he continued researching and writing until circumstances forced him to postpone that work. But he did continue the personal diary he had begun many years earlier, now with the purpose of documenting not the big picture of Nazism in Germany (he would leave that to historians) but the experience of it by a single individual, along with other ordinary personal matters he had been recording for decades.

The fact that the Nazis considered him a Jew despite his conversion to Protestantism in his youth put him in the bulls-eye of their abuse. But he was married to an "Aryan," and on that account some of the harshest measures heaped on non-Aryans were sometimes blunted or postponed, including shipment to Theresienstadt, the concentration camp in Czechoslovakia where most of Dresden's Jews were to meet their deaths. He had to wear the yellow star, avoid contact with Aryans, not use public transportation, subsist on starvation rations, and would in fact have been sent off to his death within a few days had not British Lancaster bombers rained fire on the population of Dresden, Aryan and non-Aryan alike, in the spring of 1945, allowing Victor and his wife Eva to escape the city and leave behind his Jewish identity by claiming his identification papers were destroyed in the fire.

There are plenty of books about the Nazi era. What's so special about the Klemperer diaries? Why would I recommend these two volumes to anyone interested in learning what the Hitler regime was like over any work by a professional historian, however worthy that study may be?

My answer has to do with the special character of the diaries, their combination of documentation of a horror growing worse with each passing day (everyone Klemperer talks to believes such an absurd regime will surely fall within months) and the details of a middle-aged upper-middle-class couple's life, including the stresses and strains on their marriage, not all of them the result of Nazi oppression. One quickly comes to feel one is living with the Klemperers, if only as a fly on the wall, as they struggle to complete the construction of their "dream house" in a suburb just outside Dresden — Eva's obsession despite their having to subsist on a modest pension after her husband losses his university post.

The daily visits to the house site as they scrape together the money to lay a foundation, then construct modest living quarters and, of course, a garden, seem like an exercise in futility, given what the reader knows is going to happen a few years later. You want to shout at them, "Get out! Get out!" But Eva is determined to have her house, partly, one suspects, because she had given up her own career as a musicologist and performer in favor of her husband's career. Besides, Hitler really did seem too extreme, too downright surreal, to last much longer (odd, that in America he was seen as a "moderate" who would keep the Bolshevik menace in check). And, besides, as the author of these diaries keeps asserting, he, Victor Klemperer, is a German, a real German, not like the aberrations who had taken over his country, though his faith in that identity is sorely tried over the next twelve years.

The course of the Klemperer marriage, however inadvertent, is continuous and detailed. In the '30s, Victor is careful to not complain about Eva's morning fits or constant dental emergencies or her obsession with the house, but the reader wonders what is going on in the woman's mind, when (with the hindsight of history) the dreadful future seems so clearly written on the wall. But as the years pass and the noose tightens economically and in every other way around the necks of Jews, Eva meets each new deprivation with remarkable personal resources, not just sharing all of her husband's social and economic disabilities but assisting neighbors in need in the "Jews houses" where the Klemperers are finally forced to live, right down to scrubbing their floors. She also risks her freedom (as an Aryan she could have secured her own status simply by divorcing him), if not her life, by smuggling the manuscript pages of his diary to an Aryan safe house. Using her Aryan ration card she spends hours each day scrounging for food (mostly potatoes, sometimes rotten). And, yet, the Klemperers maintain a remarkably active social life, mostly with others marked as Jews but also with a handful of Aryans.

In the end, the diaries reveal the slow maturing of two human beings who are already well into middle age at the point the diaries open. Victor evolves from a slightly ivory-towerish academic into a more fully rounded person capable of both empathy and a sense of complexity for the people, all the people, he lives among; Eva, from a house-hungry spouse with possibly a grievance about the loss of her own chance at a career into a courageous and devoted spouse and neighbor. Their marriage and love for one another grows stronger with each new stress placed upon them. What seems in the early pages of the diaries a marriage held together perhaps largely by routine and convenience, by its mid-point has become a thing of unshakable devotion and deep affection.

The diaries provide documentation of many different aspects of German society under the Third Reich, despite the restriction of their being written from one man's point of view. Among these is the obvious fact that many Germans had no use for Hitler, were sympathetic to those the Nazis designated as Jews or otherwise non-Aryan and, as might be expected in a situation where getting the wherewithal just to survive became more and more difficult, were largely ignorant of the strictures Jews were living under. Why else would they risk their own freedom and lives by befriending and assisting individual Jews? There is a naïveté about some of their expressions of support — a stranger crossing the street to shake the hand of someone wearing a yellow star (much to the chagrin of the person wearing it, knowing how dangerous such an act was, primarily for the star-wearer); a shopkeeper slipping extra food into the bag of someone wearing the star and offering a whispered word of encouragement to hang on, it won't be long now till the war is over.

There are far too many of these acts, some of them a good deal more substantial than what I've indicated, to put them down to anything other than sincerity. And on the question of what ordinary Germans knew about the "Final Solution," even Jews themselves didn't realize what shipment to Theresienstadt meant until the last year or two of the war. For a time they even entertained a belief that in Theresienstadt they would at least have a better diet and get decent medical care. It's hard to believe non-Jews could have known something more, at least not ordinary working stiffs, despite the manic, irrational broadcasts by Goebbels blaming "World Jewry" for all the evils in the world (in one he insists the Jews using their American dupes were bombing Rome in order to destroy Christianity, just a first step in their plan to kill all the gentiles in the world). Even when the truth becomes clear about Auschwitz and the other death camps, some supporters of Hitler insist the Fuehrer could not have known about the camps because he was a "man of peace.”

Klemperer writes:

"...National Socialism was already [in 1923] ...powerful and popular. Except that at the time I did not yet see it like that. How comforting and depressing that is! Depressing: Hitler really was in line with the will of the German people. Comforting: One never really knows what is going on. Then the Republic seemed secure, today the Third Reich appears secure."

But he also writes, later:

"There is no German or West European Jewish question. Whoever recognizes one, only adopts or confirms the false thesis of the NSDAP and serves its cause. Until 1933 and for at least a good century before that, the German Jews were entirely German and nothing else.... The anti-Semitism, which was always present, is not at all evidence to the contrary. Because the friction between Jews and Aryans was not half as great as that between Protestants and Catholics, or between employers and employees or between East Prussians for example and southern Bavarians or Rhinelanders and Bavarians. The German Jews were part of the German nation, as the French Jews were a part of the French nation, etc. "

There seem, in fact, to be two distinct kinds of (Aryan) Germans in these diaries: Nazi thugs who descend on Jews' apartments, beat up the old women and men and steal the butter off the table before trashing the place; and "ordinary" Germans, even officials like local police who, when they had to visit the Jews Houses, doffed their hats, shook hands, apologized for the intrusion and even offered words of reassurance. One wonders how this could be the same country, never mind the same city. These "good" Germans give Victor hope, though by the end he believes the entire nation will have to be reeducated in the values he believes to have been essential to German culture dating back to the Enlightenment (he blames Romanticism for Nazism). He, happily, lives to see that day and even to reclaim his former professorship at the Technical University of Dresden, which lay then in the Soviet zone and becomes part of East Germany.

One wonders why these diaries are not more widely read as firsthand witness for that horrific period of German history. Is it because life as Klemperer records it is too complex for our sound-bite culture (some of the older men in the Jews House cheer for the Wehrmacht — they had fought against the Brits and French in the first world war and can't bring themselves to change sides). Is it because he insists early on that Zionism and Nazism are ideologically the same thing: blood = land? I keep expecting him to change his mind about Zionism after the slaughter of Jews goes into high gear in 1942-43, but he sticks to his guns. He fully expects to be one of the slaughtered, watches as his neighbors are taken away in twos and threes. He loses his faith in the Germany he believed in before 1933, but he never loses faith in the principles he believes that culture exemplified at its best.

It's impossible to summarize a work as varied and rich as these diaries, never mind give a sense for the experience of living through those years vicariously with the Klemperers. The diaries end in 1945 with a return to their suburban home after living for several weeks as refugees in Bavaria. But that return is, of course, just another beginning. The volume of the diary that takes up where these two leave off extends as far as 1959 and was published in Britain, but not in the US. Klemperer died the following year, 1960, of a heart attack.

[Richard R]

Spanning the period from 1931 to 1945, Klemperer exhaustively documented life under the Third Reich and during the Third World War. It was an existence characterised by hunger and scarcity and, as a Jew, Klemperer was forced out of his home and made to perform forced labour for the Reich: he only survived for most of that time because his wife was not Jewish and mixed marriages were treated differently. For much of that period, he's jeered at and abused in the street but there are also people who come up and express sympathy and solidarity with him: for example, at one point a worker approaches him and says "Chin up ! The scoundrels will soon be finished!"

The most striking thing about the diaries was Klemperer's conviction that Nazism was both horrifying and risible: Klemperer is convinced that the regime was eventually fall from the outset but would certainly not have originally thought it would take twelve years. In 1938, he writes that "It was inevitable that there would be internal collapse here this winter , the Stock Exchange was in a constant state of panic , by October industry will be unable to pay wages – and then that would be followed by chaos." Then in 1942 he states that "This will be our last Christmas in the Third Reich. But we already thought that last year and were mistaken.... we have so often underestimated National Socialism’s powers of resistance." It's not until 1943 that one of acquaintances makes a largely accurate prediction: "Two-thirds of the war is behind us, ’ he said in a conversation over cigars, ‘I reckon on another two years.’ ... Yes, two years, unless there’s a miracle." Someone else talks of being at five minutes to twelve in 1944. Of course, Klemperer makes his clear he found communism equally risible and as he spent the rest of his life in East Germany, I do wonder what he would have made of the Soviet Union's survival up until 1991.

[Ella Missen · Rating 4 out of 5]

really interesting perspective, loved reading this.

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one was tough to get through at times, but I'm glad I pushed on and finished it. Overall, this was a fascinating first-hand account of being a Jew in Nazi Germany.

Victor Klemperer is a former professor and is Jewish. He's married to Eva, who is Aryan. Being in a "mixed marriage", Klemperer enjoys more freedom than if he were married to a Jewish woman. He was an extensive diarist (there are books documenting the years before and after the years covered in this book), chronicling minute details of his life, which made the reading exhaustive at times and was the part I disliked the least. It was fascinating, if horrifying, to see how the treatment of German Jews disintegrated over the period of a few short months. Beginning with being forced to wear a star on their clothing to brutal house inspections by the Gestapo and nearly starving due to lack of ration coupons and food shortages. There were also curfews, limited shopping hours, being banned from public transportation, and random summons to the Gestapo HQ for questioning.

Interestingly enough, Klemperer and his fellow Jews were completely unaware of the mass murders occurring at concentration camps until Hitler's regime fell. They knew of the concentration camps, but believed they were forced labor camps. They also knew several acquaintenances and friends who were killed while supposedly trying to escape these camps, but were clueless as to how many Jews were being killed and the brutal conditions of the camps. This was partially due to the ban on Jewish families, even those in mixed marriages, receiving newspapers and hearing the news, but it's still crazy to think that it was somewhat secret. News became similar to gossip and it was hard to tell what was true and what had been embellished.

While reading this, I had to keep reminding myself that this was his actual diaries - it still amazes me that Hitler was able to convince an entire country to go along with his plan. While the Klemperers had it somewhat easier than most Jewish residents, it was still pretty rough. Klemperer complained a lot, which was off-putting at first, but I probably would have done the same thing; it's human nature I suppose and having your life turned upside down in that way is so damaging - mentally, emotionally, physically - that being able to complain about your shoes being a size to big or being sick of eating potatoes is probably a good sign that you've still got all your marbles.

When Dresden gets bombed out and they flee to Munich and then journey back to Dresden is where the story really started to hit home and become real. There was no transportation since it was all mostly destroyed in the bombing raids, the area was overrun with Americans and Russians, refugees were everywhere - it seems like something out of a dystopian movie. It's hard to believe that people had to live through it, much less survive.

All in all, not the easiest or most fun read, but an important piece of world history meticulously documented by Klemperer. I love that the title came directly from his diaries; since he, Eva, and the friends who were hiding his diary pages would have certainly been killed if the diary entries had been found, it's amazing that they all had the courage to keep at it for so many years.