Customer Reviews

To the Bitter End (v. 2)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As with Volume One (see my review), the most disarming and appealing feature of this tome is its slow and ineluctable building of suspense and empathy as World War I veteran Klemperer steadily weaves the day to day details of his life in Nazi Germany in the 12 years of that regime into a portrait of a rogue state moving irresistably down the path to tyranny and terror. The reader is sucked into the vortex of what it is like to live under such circumstances, where an aging Jewish professor who has built a life of purpose and meaning based on scholarship, hard work, and the belief in the rationalism of the state begins to understand that it will all unravel around him.

As the story continues here, the years of tyranny of National Socialism reach their climax, so that Klemperer, a Jew married to an Aryan woman, increasingly finds solace and relief from the growing insanity swirling around him by concentrating on his academic writing, which he continues against all odds. Even the most simple and basic freedoms are denied them, so his refusal to submit to the progressively more invective growth of lies, invectives, and accusations of the Nazi regime build into a quiet resolve to resist in the way he knows best, by maintaining an intelligent, insightful, and careful witness to the everyday horrors perpetrated with malice and cunning on the Jews as the scapegoat for all of Germany's post-WWI social and economic woes.

One reads in horror as Victor and Eva continue to be persecuted and systematically stripped of everything of meaning to them; their house, car, telephone, typewriter, even their beloved cat. While he understands all too well the dangers for him and his family, he consistently resists the increasingly strident pleas from family members for him to emigrate primarily because he identifies himself first and foremost as a German, and he refuses to abandon the Fatherland to the beastial likes of Hitler and the Nazis. One's sense of horror is magnified by his careful attention to the day to day details of living in the regime, the difficulties in finding socks, or clothing, or a cobbler, or vegetables, coffee, tobacco (both he and Eva are smokers), dealing with increasingly restrictive curfews, the ordeal and shame associated with the enforced wearing of the yellow star of David, the progressive acts of enforced segregation from the general populace, the occasional experiences at degradation at the hands of a youthful crowd of Hitler Youth.

Yet there is great humanity evidenced here, both within the Jewish community and without it. The pathos of ordinary people caught in the web of a totalitarian state is made quite clear; unlike other academics who recently have argued in belief of a generalized and universalized hate on the part of ordinary Germans leading to their willing complicity in the persecution of Jews, Klemperer offers almost daily testimony of the unending acts of kindness, generosity, and personal risks that everyday citizens take to help and assist Jews to survivie against the dictates of the totalitarian regime. Again and again he is given free food, extra provisions, someone looking deliberately the other way when they did so at personal risk.

In sum, Klemperer seems to acknowledge that life in Nazi Germany was a hell for all of the citizens, Jew and non-Jew alike. He pointedly gives credit to all the Aryans who assit Eva nd him as they flee from the Nazis into the more anonymous countryside in the tumult and confusion caused by the firebombing of Dresden. This, like the first volume, is a book that should become required reading for college students in world history.

This is the continuation of Victor Klemperer's diaries written as a German Jew during the 12 year Nazi reign.

As in "I shall Bear Witness" Victor continues to chronicle the proceedings of German life in Dresden during World War II. I've assigned 5 Stars to this work. The 5 Stars are for Mr. Klemperer's audacity and courage to record these events. He was an educated man. The ever increasing tightening of all things Jewish hindered anything he did. The vacating of their home and their life in Jewish hostiles were described in great detail. The eventual elimination of their Jewish friends as described by Mr. Klemperer shows a life led in total fear during the successive pogroms against all Jews.

In all of this Victor and Eva escape the trip to a Concentration Camp. Victor is forced to labor in shoveling snow and to work in factories. He records all of these happenings and never goes to the final Jewish Solution. In 1945 the Nazi program was to rid all of Germany of the Jewish problem.

Just as Victor was to be transported to his demise, the Allies bombed Dresden. In this confusion Victor and Eva escaped West to the American Allies. The War mercifully ended and Victor, a true German embarked to return to his home on the outskirts of Dresden.

In the end Victor ended living in his beloved home in Dolzschen a suburb of Dresden. His final 15 years were lived in Communist East Germany. He really was a true German. His wife Eva died in 1951. Victor died in 1960.

I really struggled to finish this book. One must remember this was written as a day to day diary. In the end it really showed me a piece of personal history which is in itself priceless.

This is the second in the series of 3 volumes of the diaries of Victor Klemperer, a Jewish Professor who lived in Dresden with a non-Jewish wife during Nazi rule. It is undoubtedly the best perspective on what it meant to be a jew at the time. "I will bear witness", he repeated several times throughout his diaries. And so he did. It is also remarkable as an essay in human psychology, viz-a-viz the after-war period in Communist Germany. He distrusted West Germany for fear of a return of fascist beliefs; an opinion shared later by the British Prime Minister & French President, both of whom tried, privately, so we are told, to talk Gorbachev out of allowing German reunification. So there was reason in his decision, apart from personal motives regarding his prospects. I found his diaries a read that added substantially to my knowledge of humanity in authority and out-of-it.