The second volume of Victor Klemperer's searing diary, kept in secret during the 12 years he suffered under the Nazi regime, covers the period from 1942 to 1945. The humiliations visited on even such "privileged" Jews as Klemperer (whose wife was Aryan) grew increasingly severe, with house searches, arbitrary arrests, and brutal beatings becoming virtually routine. The 60-year-old historian is forced to shovel snow despite his heart condition; hunger gnaws at him as rations are mercilessly cut. Yet he clings to an intellectual life, continuing his reading and making notes on the lies and obfuscations of official Nazi discourse that would become his postwar masterpiece, Lingua Tertii Imperii. "The Russians, who have only just been annihilated, are tremendous and quite inexhaustible opponents," he notes sardonically after reading a mendacious fascist article in 1942. His lengthy account of his escape with his wife from Dresden after the Allied bombings of 1945 unforgettably captures the chaos of World War II's final days and the mixed feelings of a Jew who could never wholeheartedly gloat over the defeat of the nation that had persecuted him. Above all, his unflinching depiction of human nature and society in extremis amply justifies his cherished belief that even the Nazis "cannot prevent language from testifying to the truth." --Wendy Smith


From Publishers Weekly
This second volume of Klemperer's diary of the Nazi years confirms its place alongside Anne Frank's diary and Elie Wiesel's Night in the pantheon of Holocaust literature. Yet in many ways it is a more valuable source for the historian and general reader, as Klemperer gives the most finely detailed and intricately delineated portrait of the Nazi era for the man-in-the-street. Granted, as a Jew married to an "Aryan" woman, and with his incredible capacity to see what his fellow Germans couldn't or wouldn't see, Klemperer was no ordinary German. Rather, he was an ordinary man in his desire to live freely--and in his empathy. The defining characteristic of the diary is how he maintains a capacity for the human in the face of the barbaric. On the first day of the new year 1942, Klemperer writes: "It is said children still have a sense of wonder, later one becomes blunted.--Nonsense. A child takes things for granted, and most people get no further; only an old person, who thinks, is aware of the wondrous." Exactly one year later he writes: "The paper shortage is so great that I was unable to come by a block calendar.... I miss the calendar more than I can say. Time stands still." From paper shortages to the suicides of 3,000-4,000 Jews in the autumn of 1941 when the meaning of deportation was starting to sink in, there is no better portrayal of daily life for the Jews in Nazi Germany. As a philologist, Klemperer was engaged in a meticulous and revealing study of the Nazi lexicon. This study was interrupted by his forced labor (April 1943-June 1944), but the compulsory work was mitigated by the impending Nazi defeat. The Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945 is recounted in dramatic, breathless fashion over the course of eight pages. The bombing permits Klemperer to escape the fate of other European Jews and throws him and his wife into a strange journey through the German countryside during the spring and summer of 1945. Klemperer states that their return to Dresden was "a fairytale." They were greeted by an old man who lost his wife and whose dog had been stolen by the Russians, and by their neighbor, Frau Glaser, who welcomed them with "tears and kisses." In its depiction of the great and small injustices and barbarities of living under the Nazis, Klemperer's diary is a timeless piece of literature. (Mar.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
The second volume of Klemperer's Holocaust diary is even more compelling than the first (LJ 10/15/98). As one of 198 surviving Dresden Jews, Klemperer offers unique, keenly felt observations of daily horror. But the book succeeds not only because it bears witness to the Holocaust: it also provides the best snapshot of life on the German home front available in English. Entries focus on the daily affronts to Jewish dignity. Two moving entries, for example, describe the Klemperers' response to the Nazi order forbidding Jews to own pets; his description of putting down their cat isn't at all trite. The final portion tells of his family's flight during the Third Reich's death spasms and the journey home on foot after V-E Day. It is a testament to Klemperer's determination that the diaries are complete. If the Gestapo had caught him writing them, he would have been instantly deported. In the end, he only escaped that fate because the Allies bombed Dresden the day he was to report for deportation, and he managed to flee in the confusion. Although the two volumes should be kept together, this book can certainly stand alone. An essential purchase for any library.-Randall L. Schroeder, Wartburg Coll. Lib., Waverly, IA Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Max Frankel
More than any work of history or memory, Victor Klemperer's diary, I Will Bear Witness, compels the reader to relive the demise of Germany's Jews.


Review
"Unparalleled... rare, illuminating, and priceless."
- The New York Times


Review
"Unparalleled... rare, illuminating, and priceless."
- The New York Times


Book Description
Destined to take its place alongside The Diary of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel's Night as one of the great classics of the Holocaust, I Will Bear Witness is a timeless work of literature, the most eloquent and acute testament to have emerged from Hitler's Germany. Volume Two begins in 1942, the year the Final Solution was formally proposed, and carries us through to the Allied bombing of Dresden and Germany's defeat.


From the Inside Flap
Destined to take its place alongside The Diary of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel's Night as one of the great classics of the Holocaust, I Will Bear Witness is a timeless work of literature, the most eloquent and acute testament to have emerged from Hitler's Germany. Volume Two begins in 1942, the year the Final Solution was formally proposed, and carries us through to the Allied bombing of Dresden and Germany's defeat.


From the Back Cover
"Unparalleled... rare, illuminating, and priceless."
- The New York Times


About the Author
A professor of Romance languages in Dresden, Victor Klemperer wrote several major works on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literature before he was expelled from his post in 1935. He lived through the war in Dresden with his wife, Eva. Klemperer's secret diaries were thought for many years to have been lost or suppressed by the Communist authorities of East Germany, where Klemperer lived after the war. He wife deposited them after his death in 1960 in the Dresden Landesarchiv, where they remained until they were uncovered by Victor Nowojski, a former pupil, who edited and transcribed them for publication in Germany. Their reception there was a national event. The diaries have been translated into twelve languages.

About the Translator

Martin Chalmers has translated, from the German, books by Hubert Fichte, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Erich Fried. He is a frequent contributor to the New Statesman and The Independent, and lives in London.




Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Lives of Victor Klemperer

Escape

At the beginning of February 1945, there were 198 registered Jews, including Victor Klemperer, left in the city and the district of Dresden. The remainder of the 1,265 who had been in the city in late 1941 had been deported to Riga, to Auschwitz, to Theresienstadt. Many were shot or gassed on arrival. Some had committed suicide on receiving notice of deportation. A handful survived.

All the remaining Jews in Dresden had non-Jewish wives or husbands. This had placed them in a relatively privileged position but dependent on the courage and tenacity of their marriage partners. If the "Aryan" spouse died or divorced them, they would immediately be placed on the deportation list. The majority of such couples and families had been ghettoized, together with the less privileged Jews, in a dwindling number of "Jews' houses."

On the morning of Tuesday, February 13, all Jews considered capable of physical labor were ordered to report for deportation early on Friday, February 16. The "mixed marriages" of Dresden were finally to be split up. Victor Klemperer regarded this as a death sentence for himself and the others. Then, "on the evening of February 13 the catastrophe overtook Dresden: the bombs fell, the houses collapsed, the phosphorus flowed, the burning beams crashed onto the heads of Aryans and non-Aryans alike, and Jew and Christian met death in the same firestorm; whoever of the bearers of the star was spared by this night was delivered, for in the general chaos he could escape the Gestapo." Victor Klemperer and the other Jews who survived the Allied raid and the subsequent firestorm had experienced a double miracle, had been doubly lucky.

In the confusion following the destruction of the city, Victor Klemperer pulled off the yellow Jew's star, and he and his wife merged with the other inhabitants fleeing the city. It was easy enough for them to claim they had lost their papers. Nevertheless, afraid of being recognized and denounced, they went on the run across Germany for the next three months, until the village they had reached in southern Bavaria was occupied by American forces.

Contradictions

On the night of the Dresden firestorm, when Victor Klemperer escaped both the Allied bombs and the Gestapo, he was already sixty-three. He was born in 1881, the youngest child of Wilhelm Klemperer, rabbi in the little town of Landsberg on the Warthe (today the Polish town of Gorzow Wielkopolski), in the eastern part of the Prussian province of Brandenburg. Three brothers and four sisters survived into adulthood; the famous conductor Otto Klemperer was a cousin, but there was little contact between the two parts of the family. By the time Victor was nine, his father, after an unhappy interlude with the Orthodox congregation at Bromberg (today Bydgoszcz), had been appointed second preacher of the Berlin Reform Congregation. The whole family appears to have felt relieved at the change, and according to his autobiography, Victor immediately relished the freedom and excitement of the big city.

Observance at the Reform Synagogue was extremely liberal. The services themselves were conducted almost entirely in German, and on a Sunday, heads were not covered, and men and women sat together. There was no bar mitzvah; instead, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, boys and girls were confirmed together on Easter Sunday. There were neither Sabbath restrictions nor dietary proscriptions. The sermons seem, to some degree, to have expressed the ethical tradition of the German Enlightenment. In other words, services approximated Protestant practice, and Judaism here became as rational and progressive as it could be while retaining a Jewish identity. This was not the norm of Jewish congregations, but it is nevertheless exemplary of a tradition of merging with the dominant culture. The Reform Synagogue can perhaps be regarded as something of a halfway house to conversion to Protestantism, which had become common in Prussia since the early nineteenth century. (The parents of Karl Marx and Felix Mendelssohn were among only the most prominent examples; conversion, of course, remained for a long time a condition of state service.) Wilhelm Klemperer raised little objection when his own sons were baptized as Protestants. Indeed, Victor Klemperer's three elder brothers seem to have gone out of their way to deny their Jewish origins. The biographical note prefacing the doctoral thesis of Georg Klemperer, the oldest brother, begins with the words, "I was born the son of a country cleric."

Georg Klemperer, sixteen years Victor's senior, was only in his thirties by the time he had become a noted surgeon and one of Germany's most respected medical men. Felix and Berthold Klemperer were also successful, the former as a doctor, the latter as a lawyer. Berthold even married a general's daughter. The sisters were much less free and had Jewish husbands more or less chosen for them.

Wearying of school and perhaps even more of the tyranny of Georg, who dominated the family after the move to Berlin, Victor Klemperer did not continue into the upper grades. He became a commercial apprentice in a company that exported trinkets and souvenirs for sale in English seaside resorts. This move seems to have convinced the eldest brother of Victor's lack of ability and determination. Victor Klemperer was never to shake off the feeling that his brother condescended to him and regarded him as a dilettante.

The apprenticeship, at any rate, did not lead anywhere. Victor Klemperer had entered it with dreams of future independence. Within three years, however, intellectual and literary interests gained the upper hand; he also became a passionate theatergoer. (It was during this period, in his seventeenth year, that he began to keep a diary.) He went back to school, attending the same grammar school in Landsberg as his brothers, and lived in lodgings in the town. This time he completed his schooling and became primus in his final year-something like head prefect.

He then enrolled at Munich University to study literature and languages and was increasingly drawn to French literature. He spent terms in Geneva and Paris before returning to Berlin to complete the first part of his university studies. It was in Geneva that he discovered Voltaire as a writer and found his own spirit of tolerant skepticism confirmed. "Ferney [where Voltaire lived in exile from France] was the best thing about Geneva," Klemperer later wrote, and the visit to Voltaire's house was like a pilgrimage.

Victor Klemperer had now found his way intellectually, but a commitment to a figure like Voltaire was unlikely to make for a smooth academic career. Before 1914, the study of Romance literatures and culture in German universities was dominated by hostility to the "superficial" ideas of the French Enlightenment. In fact, Klemperer was unable to find a suitable professor with whom to undertake a doctoral thesis on Voltaire and, to his brothers' consternation, threw up his studies once again. For the next few years, from 1905, he tried to make a living as a writer and literary journalist. At this point it may be worth noting that, for all the scholarliness he was to display in the future, Klemperer never seems to have felt really comfortable with other academics, even liberal ones, or in conventional middle-class settings in general. Although he loved teaching, he did not deal very well with the social aspects of his profession. In his diaries he often appears more at ease with "practical" people or with craftsmen.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Destined to take its place alongside The Diary of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel's Night as one of the great classics of the Holocaust, I Will Bear Witness is a timeless work of literature, the most eloquent and acute testament to have emerged from Hitler's Germany. Volume Two begins in 1942, the year the Final Solution was formally proposed, and carries us through to the Allied bombing of Dresden and Germany's defeat.

FROM THE CRITICS

KLIATT