The Lesser Evil: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1945-59 [Paperback]

Victor Klemperer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2003 | Series: Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1945-59 (Book 3)

This final volume of Victor Klemperer’s diaries opens in 1945. After the horrors of the war, Victor and Eva’s return to their Dresden home seems like a fairytale. Victor tries to resume his distinguished academic career and joins East Germany’s Communist Party. In 1951, Eva dies; a year later, aged 70, Victor marries a student—an unlikely but successful love match. But with the growing repression of the Communist Party, and the memory of those who did not survive, Victor’s achievements ring hollow. Politics, he comes to believe, is, above all, the choice of “the lesser evil.” A masterpiece both of Holocaust literature and memoir.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This third and final volume of the diaries of Klemperer, a German-Jewish professor of philology who survived the Nazis because his wife was Christian, lacks the inherent drama of his life under the Nazis, related in the first two, highly acclaimed volumes, and many readers will be mystified by the political twists and turns of East German communism. Nonetheless, Klemperer was an acute observer of life's complexities, and the diary becomes quite a good read. In 1945, he is amazed that he has survived, but the conditions of life are still wrenching. He is suspicious of all the former acquaintances who shunned him in the Nazi years and now fawn over him. As a privileged academic in Communist East Germany, Klemperer attends endless, mind-numbing meetings, but also receives a number of appointments, a good salary and a cherished automobile. He publishes his most important work, LTI, a study of Nazi language. As someone who had suffered so acutely under the Nazis, he believes communism is "the lesser evil," yet he is anguished by the parallels between Nazism and communism. The diary is a poignant document about life under communism and the political choices that so many Europeans faced after WWII.
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Review

“Klemperer’s diary deserves to rank alongside that of Anne Frank.” -- The Sunday Times

“One of the greatest diarists—perhaps the greatest—in the German language.” -- The New York Times Book Review

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Product Details

• Paperback: 656 pages
• Publisher: Phoenix (September 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0753817942
• ISBN-13: 978-0753817940
• Product Dimensions: 2 x 5.5 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,092,762 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars When Reason is All but not Enough, November 28, 2007

By 

Richard A. Preto-rodas - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Lesser Evil: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1945-59 (Paperback)

Victor Klemperer's The Lesser Evil completes his three volume diary as a Jewish college professor in Germany from 1933 to 1959. In this volume, he covers the years from the end of the Second World War until his final illness and to my mind provides the most rewarding literary experience. To be sure, his account of the tightening Nazi noose following Hitler's ascension to power and the horrors and restrictions of the war years as a Jew married to an "Aryan" woman have few equals in Holocaust literature. Only the fire bombing of Dresden on the eve of a scheduled deportation of his city's remaining handful of Jews and their spouses allowed him to survive. But the post-war years provide the fascinating portrait of a genteel intellectual dedicated to the rule of reason (a major scholarly pursuit as a Professor of Romance Languages and Literature involves his work on the French Enlightenment) trying to balance between the resurgent militarism and consumerism of the triumphant western powers and the repression of a socialist German Democratic Republic, the title's "lesser evil" where he chooses to live. Klemperer is keenly aware of his own inconsistencies as a secular humanist with a deep appreciation of traditional spiritual values, often describing his situation as one of falling between the two chairs of the East-West confrontation that became the Cold War. In 1951, the grieving widower remarries within a year, feeling both guilt and gratitude and humbled by two women more talented and generous than himself. Hardly heroic, he manages to seem admirable as he struggles to keep afloat despite terrible times and petty academic politics.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Between Two Stools And Confused!, March 12, 2010

By 

Richard C. Geschke "In search of History!!" (Bristol, Ct) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Lesser Evil: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1945-59 (Hardcover)

This diary by Victor Klemperer represents the good Professor's private thoughts of life as he saw it in East Germany during the post war years of 1945 through 1959. Having been lucky enough to survive WWII as a Jew living in Germany, one would think that life in post war Germany would be much easier. At the end of the war Klemperer and his wife Eva found themselves in the American occupation sector. Despite being Jewish and with his hometown of Dresden almost completely destroyed, he insists on returning and living in the Russian East German sector.

As described in the diary, we see how Russia deals with the reeducation and punishment of Nazi's and how surviving Jews are upgraded in German society. Klemperer tells us of his re-installment as a full Professor and becomes a published Author and man of letters. During this post war period Klemperer becomes involved in Communist politics and asserts that life in the GDR (East Germany) is the lesser evil of the two Germanys during this "Cold War" period. It is this ongoing inner argument of which German government is right that puts Klemperer in the so called position of "between two stools", which means he can't please all the people he associates with because he seeks one true and benevolent entity but neither one really suffices.

Along with Klemperer's inner political torture, he has to deal with the death of his first wife Eva and the marriage to his very young wife Hadwig. Klemperer mentions death all during his 15 years of diary entries much as he did during his war entries. His health as he says was always bad, much as during the Nazi regime. In retrospect bad health or not, Klemperer lived over 78 years.

Klemperer shows his struggles and inner doubts along with his desire for fulfillment, vanity and the search for academic excellence. In many instances he is much too hard on himself. His diary marks the time of life in a Germany which no longer exists. In the end politics in Germany aggravated him to no end. In retrospect there really was no "lesser evil".

This last diary from Klemperer gives great insight from an educated man living behind the iron curtain. This is a fitting finale of a set of diaries on the order of Samuel Pepys.

23 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Pity it is so much missing, May 8, 2005

By 

J. Kertesz "julie70 on the web" (London, UK) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Lesser Evil: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1945-59 (Paperback)

I was excited to read the rest of his life and journal : I do like a lot how he writes. I do not like at all, all the editorial cuts and even less when they felt they have to remplace it with a cold short story "what was cut" altering a lot the flow of reading.

Or it was not important, and they could have put (...) like elsewere, or they should have left it there. His journals are so important, I am so sorry that I cannot read German, where they are twice as long. Already, the second wife cut some from his words, now the editors and the translators. Really pity !