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

Product Information

Though not a religious man, Victor Klemperer needed a religious identity, as Jew, Christian or dissident, to support his academic career. He chose Christianity as being most compatible with his much stronger conviction of being German, and became baptised again in Berlin in 1912. [5] All this, and the ever-narrowing horizons of his own private world, produces a nightmarish picture of life within a national society gone berserk; the inferno is an artful mosaic, made up of endless fragments of meanness (and a few isolated acts of kindness).

Detailed film notes on 750 films, accompanied by a separate filmography: a treasure trove for cineasts More than 50 years after the terrible air bombardment that killed 135,000 people -- and saved Klemperer's life -- many scars and wounds endure. As I turned the corner into the wide Pragerstrasse, I ran into 100 or so men and women, mostly young, Welt- ("world", as in Weltanschauung, "intuition/view of the world"): this was quite a rare, specific and cultured term before the Third Reich, but became an everyday word. It came to designate the instinctive understanding of complex geo-political problems by the Nazis, which allowed them to openly begin invasions, twist facts or violate human rights, in the name of a higher ideal and in accordance to their theory of the world.The Nazis are un-German.") A year after being compelled, to his utter horror, to display the yellow Judenstern on his outer coat, he wrote: "I am now fighting the hardest battle for my Deutschtum. I must hold on to When they first began to appear, the Klemperer diaries were compared favorably (by Time and other publications) with the diary of Anne Frank. Such comparisons are unfair: a late-middle-aged professor and an adolescent girl are bound to have incommensurable views of the world. It is Anne Frank’s childish naiveté that lends her journal its unforgettable charm, and her fate that renders it unbearably poignant; by contrast, the relatively happy end of Klemperer’s war is less obviously tragic.

Klemperer's ambition was to be the "cultural historian of the present catastrophe" (Jan. 10, 1942). In this he was entirely successful. His main theme is the uniqueness of the Nazi tyranny: "There is nothing spontaneous. All is methodical blow this horn." He corrected her vehemently. "We didn't have to." In really free elections he has voted for the right cause. This I can't forgive him. The poor dog may be frightened for his job. He must howl with

Become a Member

July 1, Saturday. Language Note: Goebbels in the Political Academy on June 30 (formal lecture therefore) on Fascism (approvingly therefore): “The Fascist Party in Italy has brought into being a huge organization of many millions which includes everything, popular theater, popular games, sport, tourism, hiking, singing, and is supported by the state with every resource.”

Klemperer's "Diaries 1933-1945" were published last fall in Germany to general acclaim and to some argument. The acclaim was a result of Victor Klemperer's evocative literary gift, his power of observation. No one, including those By the time the GI’s came on the scene, Klemperer notes sardonically, “the Third Reich is already as good as forgotten, everyone was opposed to it, ‘always’ opposed to it.” Not until a week after the end of the war did he dare reveal his Jewish identity to a German official in a village where the Klemperers were staying. Her response: “Immediately smiling courtesy, helpfulness, expression of respect. One ‘Herr Professor’ after the other.” When he asked her not to tell the villagers, whom he still did not trust, she replied vehemently: “Well, do you think you still have anything to fear? On the contrary: you will get preferential treatment!” Thus does Klemperer’s chronicle of the Third Reich, which begins in agony, end in excruciating irony. 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 patriotism linked not to the German nation but to the liberal West German constitution adopted in 1949 with the blessings of the Anglo-American-French occupation powers).The complete edition of the diaries offers an even more comprehensive and detailed picture of the decades documented by Klemperer. November 24, 1936– On the language of the Third Reich:...The Fuhrer must be followed blindly, blindly! They do not need to explain anything at all, since they are accountable to no one. Today it occurred to me: Never has the tension between human power and powerlessness, human knowledge and human stupidity been so overwhelmingly great as now. It must have been obvious long before 20 July [1944, the date of Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg’s attempt on Hitler’s life] that there was nothing left to moderate—and after 20 July the madness continued for nearly a whole year. No, if I look at these things objectively, I cannot find anybody free of guilt. Victor Klemperer's wife was not Jewish. She was an "Aryan" German, and her marriage to Klemperer allowed him to survive this period, as many intermarried Jews were able to. The Nazi Government could not effectively force people to divorce, so many intermarried Jewish and non-Jewish Germans stayed married, despite scrutiny by others. Intermarriage helped Victor Klemperer to survive, but brought down his wife's societal status.