I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941
- Book Review,
by Victor Klemperer
Amazon.com
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Victor Klemperer (1881-1960), honored as a frontline veteran of World War I, was a distinguished professor at the University of Dresden. A scant few months later he was merely a Jew, protected from deportation to a death camp only by his marriage to an Aryan. He suffered every other indignity to which German Jews were subjected, from losing his job to having his driver's license revoked to being denied permission to own a pet, and all are recorded with bitter clarity in his diary entries, which cover the years 1933 to 1941. (A second volume continuing through 1945 will be published in English in 1999.) The German edition of this book caused a sensation when it was published in 1995, and it's easy to see why: the relentless, quotidian nature of Nazi racism comes through forcefully in Klemperer's litany of daily humiliations and insults, a painful chronicle of situations in which readers can readily imagine themselves. Like Anne Frank, but with a more adult understanding of political fanaticism and human weakness, he makes the abstract horror of genocidal persecution very intimate, very personal, and very real. --Wendy Smith
From Publishers Weekly
In April 1935, Klemperer (1881-1960) was a Protestant professor of French literature at Dresden University and a front-line veteran of WWI. By early May, he was simply a Jew and, like other Jews, forcibly retired. His marriage to an Aryan gave him (precarious) protection, and by 1945, he was one of only 198 registered Jews left in Dresden. Through it all, Klemperer kept a diary (Vol. II, 1942-1945, is due out in 1999) that turns out to be one of the most important to come out of Nazi Germany. While his early entries are filled with work and health, as circumstances worsened his focus turns to the nuances of Nazism's degrading influence. Small acts of kindness and solidarity from Gentiles were surprisingly frequent, yet pervasive isolation and lack of courage left real resistance a fantasy for everyone but the Wends (Catholic Slav peasants) and the Communists (whom Klemperer would later join). Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this book is Klemperer's parallel record of the insidious progress of laws that stripped Jews of their rights and of the propaganda and censorship that stripped the Germans of their judgment. But through it all, Klemperer maintained his "commitment to Germanness," making his account more akin to the complexities recorded in Peter Gay's recent My German Question than Daniel Goldhagen's simplistic Hitler's Willing Executioners. The diaries weren't intended for publicationAthey are in part a m?lange of notes for a study of Nazi manipulation of language and jottings regarding quotidian concerns about Klemperer's teeth, the cat's health or the price of supplies. This catch-all quality adds veracity to Klemperer's shrewd understanding of Germany's nightmarish decline, however, evincing the kind of clarity that usually comes with hindsight. First serial to the New Yorker; audio rights to Random, all others to Aufbau Verlag. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This day-by-day secret diary of the Nazi period belongs with the best accounts of the era. Klemperer, a Dresden professor of Romance languages in his fifties when the entries begin, can be vain, brave, or eloquently despairing while always keeping his frustrated writer's eye on the increasingly ominous events around him. The record is his daily revenge as he slowly loses his rights, dons the yellow star, and watches his wife become nearly paralyzed with terror. "I feel shame more than fear," he writes of the early Nazi outrages. "I have truly always felt a German." More aware of outside life than the young Anne Frank, Klemperer gives us an extraordinary record that is like nothing else. (LJ Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The New York Times Book Review, Peter Gay
...a hypnotic experience; the whole, hard to put down, is a true murder mystery--from the perspective of the victim.
The New York Times, Richard Bernstein
Written for himself, apparently without any thought of eventual publication, the book is history raw, an unvarnished account of a single exceedingly beleaguered life, most notable for the petty outrages, the quiet desperation and the undercover spiritual struggle that they reveal.
The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Saul Friedlander
The diary that Klemperer kept during those years is possibly the most extraordinary one to have come out of that darkness; it will remain as one of the great testimonies of our century. The English translation, it should be added, reads beautifully.
From Booklist
Klemperer, a professor at the University of Dresden, was a Jew by birth. He managed to survive the war, living relatively unscathed with his Aryan wife in Dresden. After his death in 1960, a former student discovered his wartime diaries, and this is the first volume to be published in the U.S. Klemperer, an expert on French literature, displays his own literary gifts in this engrossing and surprisingly understated saga of a society's descent into barbarism. Shunning dramatic or even viscerally disturbing scenes of brutality, Klemperer shows us how the Nazis gradually put their stranglehold on the everyday lives of Germans. In the process, small acts of injustice slowly gave way to larger and more outrageous attacks on the rights of Jews and anyone else who stood in the Nazis' path. Despite the horrors unfolding in front of him, Klemperer remained a German patriot, and his descriptions of acts of kindness and decency by individual Germans, despite the pressures brought on them to hate, are a devastating counterpoint to those, like Daniel Goldhagen, who indicted the entire German people. Jay Freeman
From Kirkus Reviews
A classic (of two genres) finally translated into English. As an example both of Holocaust literature and the memoir, the diaries of Klemperer are superior. First published in 1995 in Germany, the diaries there caused a minor sensation: Nearly 150,000 copies of the 1,500-page hardcover edition were sold (the present volume contains the first half of the diaries, in a slightly abridged form); a television serial is in production. Although less well known than his famous conductor-cousin, Otto Klemperer, Victor began his career as a literary journalist and became a highly regarded historian and scholar of the Enlightenmenta courageous choice in a Germany where the ``superficial'' French Enlightenment was spuriously contrasted with the ``profundity'' of German philosophy. Klemperer, a German Jew, served in WWI and married a Protestant woman; both experiences would help to insure his survival during the Holocaust. For him, just as for many others in Nazi Europe, the decision to keep a diary was an act of moral rebellion and resistance against a totalitarian state. The diaries are unique, written with a marvelous urgency. As a linguist, Klemperer has always been sensitive to the nuances of words; his study of the Nazi lexicon, published after the war, is a classic in the field. In the diaries, he didnt wish to paint a large picture, preferring instead to record lifes daily small details. Six weeks after Hitler's appointment, Klemperer confided, ``I can no longer get rid of the feeling of disgust and shame . . . it's terribly frivolous to write all this in my diary.'' He always insisted that as a German Jew he represented the real Germany, while the Nazis were barbaric impostors. Whatever kind of catharsis the diaries may supply to Germans, others will also read them gratefully. (First serial to the New Yorker) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Book Description
March 10, 1933--"January 30: Hitler Chancellor. What, up to election, I called terror, was a mild prelude. On Saturday I heard a part of Hitler's speech from Königsberg. The front of a hotel at the railway station, illuminated, a torchlight procession. . . . I understood only occasional words. But the tone! The unctuous bawling, truly bawling, of a priest." Struggling to complete his ambitious history of eighteenth-century France, Victor Klemperer loses his professorship, then his car, his phone, his house, even his typewriter, under the ever-tightening Nazi grip. Not since the diary of Anne Frank has a secret journal burst onto the scene with such mesmerizing urgency. I Will Bear Witness is a testament of rare eloquence and humanity by the most astute witness ever to emerge from Hitler's Germany. It is a work of literature as well as a revelation of the day-by-day terror of the Nazi years.
Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German
From the Publisher
Reviews of the Klemperer diaries from London:"Klemperer's diary is like a painting by Peter Brueghel. We marvel at the depth of his depiction... These diaries are certain to become not only the main primary source for historians of the Nazi period, but also an essential read for anyone who wishes to understand what it was like to be a Jew living in Germany in the 1930s... But read this wonderful book and judge for yourself." -- Philip Kerr, The Sunday Times"Why the excitement? Because Klemperer is a special case... The life, the survival against the odds, the fixed viewpoint -- all this is exceptional. But not even that makes for success. It is indeed Klemperer's particular gifts which are decisive... The terror -- that tightening noose -- and the endlessly mounting chicanery against Jews become palpable, and yet Klemperer's determination to record with unwavering honesty never flags... And he was there, day in, day out, from start to finish." -- Philip Brady, The Guardian"It is not the horror of the Holocaust we see here, bu the subtle, barely discernible corruption of daily life, as the regime's cocktail of economic recovery, coercion and propaganda poisons the minds and perverts the conduct of ordinary Germans... I Will Bear Witness seems, in this light, a good title for this excellent English edition... few English readers will fail to be moved." -- Niall Ferguson, The Sunday Telegraph"The best written, most evocative, most observant record of daily life in the Third Reich." -- Amos Elon, The New York Times
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