I Will Bear Witness 1942-1945: A Diary of the Nazi Years [Paperback]

Victor Klemperer (Author), Martin Chalmers (Translator)

Book Description

Series: Modern Library Paperbacks | Publication Date: April 3, 2001

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 576 pages
• Publisher: Modern Library (April 3, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375756973
• ISBN-13: 978-0375756979
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 1.1 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #61,710 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #31 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Educators

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44 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Authenticity at last., May 1, 2000

By 

Dr. Margret Popp "Margret Popp" (Würzburg Germany) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942-1945 (Hardcover)

I devoured the roughly 1500 pages of Victor Klemperer's diary 1933-1945 in the German original in four consecutive days and nights. What grips one is the question how Klemperer, an identifiable Jew, could have survived the Third Reich in the face of the horrendous persecution of the Jews which his diary shows closing in on him from all sides, and still be alive at the end of the Second World War viz the second volume of the book.

What saved him was favorable coincidents -- so many of them that they would appear improbable in a work of fiction. On some occasions, his marriage to a Christian wife, a concert pianist, worked in his favor; on others, the courage of friends of the family, like the dentist, who dared to hide Klemperer's completed diary pages in her home - despite the danger of Gestapo raids - to save them for posterity; at other points the leniency of an official helped (Klemperer's World-War-I-medal for bravery, or his renown as a Professor of Romance Philology tended to summon respect).

In this second volume, it is shown how humiliations for Jews went from bad to worse as the War climaxed. Jews e.g. were no longer permitted to use a seat when they rode in a tram. On one occasion, when Klemperer was on a tram-platform (where he was permitted to stand), the tramdriver addressed him in a sympathetic fashion saying: "What a relief to see your yellow star. At last someone to talk to openly in this moronic madness of a War." By a near miracle, Klemperer and his wife survived the Dresden air raid in February 1945, and his wife pulled the yellow star off him; he then survived the remainder of the war by posturing as an "Aryan" who lost all his identification.

My mother used to say: "No matter what I can tell you about the Third Reich, you won't be able to realize its real atmosphere. Life under that dictatorship is not transmittable by mere words." The sensation is that Klemperer's diaries do transmit that atmosphere, and in enormously precise words. The authenticity of the account arises from the peculiar perspective of a diarist, who, at any given point, possesses neither a privileged view of the future, nor easy hindsight-cleverness.

An example is Klemperer's poignant account of the deportation of the Dresden Jews. Trembling he might be with the next transport, he was at pains to gather all available information, but with little success. The fate of the deported was strictly prohibited knowledge, and rumors were ineffectual in this era of universal mutual distrust. Klemperer surmises, no sooner than three years into the War, that they probably all get killed. Auschwitz especially, he suspects, must be a slaughterhouse. But only after the end of the war he learns that the number of victims runs to the millions, that some people were read out for immediate destruction at the trains' arrival ramps, that people were purposefully annihilated by forced labor and hunger, by medical experiments, and gassings.

Klemperer's portrayal of the non-Jewish Germans permits no easy generalizations. By at least as great a number of his German compatriots was he shown friendliness as unfriendliness. The behavior of the civilians was frequently tolerable, the chicanery and humiliations typically coming from the uniformed representatives of the suppressors, as the Gestapo. Heinous behavior was shown by the Hitler Youth in toto, a group into whom the fear and hatred of Jews was drilled unremittingly from the tenderest age by the Party Youth organization, which often caused rifts in families where no such fanaticism had originally ruled.

This is certainly an account of history from which one can learn - important both for Germany in particular and for mankind in general, as a portrayal of human behavior under a terrible dictatorship, in which the varnish of human civilization cracked, and man stood revealed as the beast he can be. The book's instructive power lies in its precision; it is the most authentic book I ever read about the Third Reich.

41 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Volume Two Continues This Valuable & Frightening Story, June 3, 2000

By 

Barron Laycock "Labradorman" (Temple, New Hampshire United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942-1945 (Hardcover)

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.

37 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A terrible tragedy, but evil did not triumph, March 25, 2000

By 

Christopher W. Coffman (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942-1945 (Hardcover)

Klemperer's courage-and that of his wife and a tiny circle of confidants-and his almost superhuman endurance made possible the remarkable feat of keeping an almost daily diary during years of a starvation diet, Gestapo terror, persecution, exhausting physical labour, etc. Many media reviews refer to Klemperer's vivid description of the mechanics of Nazi persecution and criminality, which is indeed a compelling feature of the diaries, and an important testimony. But, more profoundly, Klemperer's diaries demonstrate that the Nazis emphatically failed in their attempt to dehumanise and destroy Klemperer. If anything, the somewhat unlikeable intellectual of the early diary is tempered into a figure of true greatness in the second volume--just as the persecution he endures reaches an almost fatal intensity.

This is perhaps the key insight offered by Klemperer's diaries: they demonstrate that, while the Nazis did everything in their power to do so, they did not in fact rob Klemperer of his dignity, his inner dignity as a sensitive and ethical human being. Our century has tended to see victims of evil as largely passive and pathetic. We have forgotten that it is possible to die nobly. Klemperer's diaries remind us that the Jews, massacred by the millions, were not necessarily deprived of their humanity and dignity even as they were put to death. Photographs cannot testify to this, in fact they tend to convey the opposite impression. It is only the whispering of the soul on its way to meet its Maker which could testify to this. Klemperer's diaries are something similar.

Some readers will take offense at a small fraction of Klemperer's opinions, chiefly his hostility to Zionism, which he saw as basically another race-based idealogy. This disagreement should not be allowed to become an obstacle to an understanding of the clear meaning of his diaries.

Klemperer's diaries are magnificent and should be widely read, not just because of their vivid and detailed account of life during the Nazi years, but because they are proof that the bestial violence of the Nazis could not and did not deprive the Nazi's victims of their humanity; many millions died and are unable to affirm this; Klemperer lived and testifies to this truth on behalf of them all.