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

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But let's return to Klemperer's diary. It reminded me, once again, about the same old truth that people often fall under the yoke of manmade organizations and socio-political structures. In Klemperer's case, that was the Nazi state that was an oppressor and killer. The Nazi party was a soulless organization, using on the one hand rationalistic mechanisms of bureaucracy and government, and following on the other hand, an insane, totally detached from the reality ideology. (In Solzhenitsyn, the monster was the Soviet Russia and the Communist party.) It is said, children still have a sense of wonder," writes Klemperer at the beginning of his tale, "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." Day in, day out, Klemperer comments on current affairs: on Hitler's speeches ("his favorite foreign words are 'discrimination' and 'defamation'") and the elimination of all opposition, on the racial laws, on the war's

Volk(s)- ("Volk = people, Volks = of or for the people (prefix)"). Volksgemeinschaft designated the racially pure community of nations. Volkswagen is an example of a term which has outlived the Third Reich. Dresden was known before the war as the "Florence of the North." Very little of its baroque splendor remains. The view of Dresden today from the surrounding hills is almost as bleak as that of, say, Kaliningrad or of some other Communist citywho toward the end of the war tried to assassinate Hitler, had been so clearsighted from the very first as he had been about the unmitigated horror of Nazism and the ruin it would bring upon Germany. Klemperer was recently awarded posthumously the prestigious Geschwister Scholl Prize for Civic Courage. (Sophie and Hans Scholl, two young students, were executed in 1943 for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets.) Walser happened to be the main speaker at Before reunification, liberal Germans often maintained that Germany was no longer a nation-state. Even some conservatives were ready to concede that nationalism had been the gravedigger of Europe, and of Germany, in two World Wars. Liberals upheld Verfassungspatriotism

Though he had little access to reliable information—far less so than most Germans, who could and did listen to the BBC or other Allied radio stations, usually with impunity—Klemperer was able to report in his diary the mass shooting of Jews on the eastern front in January 1942. By March of the same year, he had heard about Auschwitz. In April, a carpenter told his wife in detail about the massacres at Babi Yar outside Kiev. In an entry dated October 1942 he calls Auschwitz a “swift-working slaughterhouse,” and by January of the following year he is speaking of “the constant dreadful fear of Auschwitz.” In October 1944, he was told that “six to seven million Jews” had been “shot or gassed.” He records cases of the Gestapo not only taunting its victims with the imminence of their extermination but informing non-Jews of what lay in store for the Jews. In such entries, Klemperer demolishes once and for all the myth that ordinary Germans did not and could not know about the Holocaust. When a neighbor remarks that Klemperer, in his isolation, would hardly be able to cover in his diary the "main events" like the war, he writes: "The main events aren't as important for my record as is the every-day of the tyranny, passing mood, every incident in what he called "the sheer fairy-tale horror" of life under the Nazi tyranny: "Observe, study, record everything that happens -- tomorrow it'll look different, tomorrow it will feel differently. In 2003, Stan Neumann directed a documentary based on Klemperer's diaries, La langue ne ment pas ( Language does not lie), which considers the importance of Klemperer's observations and the role of the witness in extreme situations. I heard a piece of Hitler's speech in Konsigsberg. I understood only a few words. But the tone! The unctuous roaring bark, the bark, really, of a clergyman. . . . How long will I be able to retain my professorship?

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Klemperer, Victor, I Shall Bear Witness: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer, 1933–41, translated by Martin Chalmers, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998 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] the "incommensurable hate" of the Jews– an example of Orwellian ambiguity: the Jews have an "incommensurable hate" of the Third Reich (aggressive or conspiratorial), but the German people have an "incommensurable hate" of the Jews (spontaneous and legitimate).

be taken up once again. The so-called German-Jewish symbiosis had not necessarily been a tragicomic self-delusion, as Gershom Scholem and many others had claimed. Nor was it necessarily one-sided. The tragedy had not been inevitable. Omer Bartov. 2003. Germany's War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories. Cornell University Press. p. 201

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Far more sophisticated than later historians, Klemperer remarks time and again on the insidious way that even decent Germans were implicated by Nazi indoctrination. In August 1944, for example, during an air-raid drill, the warden, “a decent man,” at first indignantly denied that Jews would be left to burn if their cellar collapsed, but then admitted: “I should very much like to help you, but as you know, my hands are tied.” Klemperer’s acid comment: Jünger’s diaries are far more self-consciously literary than Klemperer’s. As a distinguished amateur entomologist, Jünger had no less an eye for detail, albeit of a clinical kind, but where Klemperer’s responses to what he sees are spontaneous and ethical, Jünger’s are studiedly aesthetic. Indeed, Jünger—as a good Nietzschean—deliberately excludes any hint of Judeo-Christian compassion from his reflections on the human catastrophe that he observed from the side of the aggressor. Similarly absent is any sense of responsibility arising from that aggression. The diarist looks down on the maelstrom of events as if from a higher sphere, one in which anti-Semitism is construed as a vulgar vice (to which, incidentally, in his own earlier journalism, Jünger himself had hardly been immune) rather than a genocidal ideology. This was not Klemperer’s attitude; indeed, he saw clearly that such passivity was at the root of the German problem. In January 1947, two years after the end of the war, he wrote to a former pupil, Hans Hirche, who had appealed to him for help. Hirche had been a major in the Wehrmacht and was now having difficulty finding a civilian job. Klemperer is blunt Hirche’s word of honor that he was innocent of atrocities, even if accepted, does not exonerate him of guilt: “You and all the others must have known what crazy criminals you were serving, what unthinkable cruelties you stood up for and made possible by your loyalty.” To the claim, “we didn’t know,” Klemperer rejoins: “Hadn’t one of you read Hitler’s Mein Kampf, where all that was later carried out had been planned in advance with shameless openness? And were all these murders, all these crimes, wherever one looked, only evident to us—I do not only mean the Jews, but all the persecuted?” After Hitler came to power, however, Klemperer realized that it was only a matter of time before he would lose his job. As a veteran, he was exempt from the initial purge of Jewish academics, but his students were deterred from attending his lectures and seminars, and in May 1935 he was summarily dismissed. Though he despised the cowardice of more conformist colleagues, and was glad to escape the bizarre academic rituals that Nazis like the philosopher Martin Heidegger loved to improvise, the loss of his professorial status led to daily humiliations and cumulative persecution. The Dresden bombing almost certainly saved Klemperer’s life. Carrying out a compulsory labor assignment, he had delivered summonses for deportation to most of the remaining Jews of the city, many of them seriously ill or mothers with small children. Then the Allied bombers arrived. His description, written a few days later, vividly evokes the firestorm, in the course of which Eva disappeared and he was slightly wounded in the face. He dashed through the conflagration, clutching the bag containing his precious diary, his head swathed in a blanket. Reaching a terrace by the river Elbe, he watched as the “little rococo jewel-box” of Dresden was incinerated along with at least 30,000 people. As dawn broke on February 14, Eva found him and ripped the hateful yellow star from his coat.