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Victor Klemperer

I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941 Paperback – November 15, 1999

by Victor Klemperer (Author), Martin Chalmers (Introduction)

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The publication of Victor Klemperer's secret diaries brings to light one of the most extraordinary documents of the Nazi period. "In its cool, lucid style and power of observation," said The New York Times, "it is the best  written, most evocative, most observant record of daily life in the Third Reich." I Will Bear Witness is a work of literature as well as a revelation of the day-by-day horror of the Nazi years.

A Dresden Jew, a veteran of World War I, a man of letters and historian of great sophistication, Klemperer recognized the danger of Hitler as early as 1933. His diaries, written in secrecy, provide a vivid account of everyday life in Hitler's Germany.

What makes this book so remarkable, aside from its literary distinction, is Klemperer's preoccupation with the thoughts and actions of ordinary Germans: Berger the greengrocer, who was given Klemperer's house ("anti-Hitlerist, but of course pleased at the good exchange"), the fishmonger, the baker, the much-visited dentist. All offer their thoughts and theories on the progress of the war: Will England hold out? Who listens to Goebbels? How much longer will it last?

This symphony of voices is ordered by the brilliant, grumbling Klemperer, struggling to complete his work on eighteenth-century France while documenting the ever- tightening Nazi grip. He loses first his professorship and then his car, his phone, his house, even his typewriter, and is forced to move into a Jews' House (the last step before the camps), put his cat to death (Jews may not own pets), and suffer countless other indignities.

Despite the danger his diaries would pose if discovered, Klemperer sees it as his duty to record events. "I continue to write," he notes in 1941 after a terrifying run-in with the police. "This is my heroics. I want to bear witness, precise witness, until the very end."   When a neighbor remarks that, in his isolation, Klemperer will not be able to cover the main events of the war, he writes: "It's not the big things that are important, but the everyday life of  tyranny, which may be forgotten. A thousand mosquito bites are worse than a blow on the head. I observe, I note, the mosquito bites."

This book covers the years from 1933 to 1941. Volume Two, from 1941  to 1945, will be published in 1999.

Print length

544 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Modern Library
Publication date

November 15, 1999
Dimensions

5.25 x 1.22 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

0375753788
ISBN-13

978-0375753787
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"One of the great testimonies of our century. . . . Klemperer's ability to grasp moods and attitudes has a truly Dickensian quality."   --Los Angeles Times

"What has been called one of the most remarkable documents to come out of the Second World War turns out to be one of the most compulsively readable books of the year."        --The San Diego Union Tribune

"For the next generation of historians, Klemperer's diaries will be required reading."  --Gordon Craig, The New York Review of Books

"To read his almost day-by-day account is a hypnotic experience; the whole, hard to put down, is a true murder mystery--from the perspective of the victim."--Peter Gay, The New York Times Book Review

From the Back Cover

The publication of Victor Klemperer's secret diaries brings to light one of the most extraordinary documents of the Nazi period. "In its cool, lucid style and power of observation," said The New York Times, "it is the best written, most evocative, most observant record of daily life in the Third Reich." I Will Bear Witness is a work of literature as well as a revelation of the day-by-day horror of the Nazi years.
A Dresden Jew, a veteran of World War I, a man of letters and historian of great sophistication, Klemperer recognized the danger of Hitler as early as 1933. His diaries, written in secrecy, provide a vivid account of everyday life in Hitler's Germany.
What makes this book so remarkable, aside from its literary distinction, is Klemperer's preoccupation with the thoughts and actions of ordinary Germans: Berger the greengrocer, who was given Klemperer's house ("anti-Hitlerist, but of course pleased at the good exchange"), the fishmonger, the baker, the much-visited dentist. All offer their thoughts and theories on the progress of the war: Will England hold out? Who listens to Goebbels? How much longer will it last?
This symphony of voices is ordered by the brilliant, grumbling Klemperer, struggling to complete his work on eighteenth-century France while documenting the ever- tightening Nazi grip. He loses first his professorship and then his car, his phone, his house, even his typewriter, and is forced to move into a Jews' House (the last step before the camps), put his cat to death (Jews may not own pets), and suffer countless other indignities.
Despite the danger his diaries would pose if discovered, Klemperer sees it as his duty to recordevents. "I continue to write," he notes in 1941 after a terrifying run-in with the police. "This is my heroics. I want to bear witness, precise witness, until the very end." When a neighbor remarks that, in his isolation, Klemperer will not be able to cover the main events of the war, he writes: "It's not the big things that are important, but the everyday life of tyranny, which may be forgotten. A thousand mosquito bites are worse than a blow on the head. I observe, I note, the mosquito bites."

This book covers the years from 1933 to 1941. Volume Two, from 1941 to 1945, will be published in 1999.

About the Author

A professor of Romance languages in Dresden, Victor Klemperer wrote several major works on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literature before he was expelled from his post in 1935. He lived through the war in Dresden with his wife, Eva. Klemperer's secret diaries were thought for many years to have been lost or suppressed by the Communist authorities of East Germany, where Klemperer lived after the war. He wife deposited them after his death in 1960 in the Dresden Landesarchiv, where they remained until they were uncovered by Victor Nowojski, a former pupil, who edited and transcribed them for publication in Germany. Their reception there was a national event. The diaries have been translated into twelve languages.

About the Translator

Martin Chalmers has translated, from the German, books by Hubert Fichte, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Erich Fried. He is a frequent contributor to the New Statesman and The Independent, and lives in London.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Lives of Victor Klemperer

Escape

At the beginning of February 1945, there were 198 registered Jews, including Victor Klemperer, left in the city and the district of Dresden. The remainder of the 1,265 who had been in the city in late 1941 had been deported to Riga, to Auschwitz, to Theresienstadt. Many were shot or gassed on arrival. Some had committed suicide on receiving notice of deportation. A handful survived.

All the remaining Jews in Dresden had non-Jewish wives or husbands. This had placed them in a relatively privileged position but dependent on the courage and tenacity of their marriage partners. If the "Aryan" spouse died or divorced them, they would immediately be placed on the deportation list. The majority of such couples and families had been ghettoized, together with the less privileged Jews, in a dwindling number of "Jews' houses."

On the morning of Tuesday, February 13, all Jews considered capable of physical labor were ordered to report for deportation early on Friday, February 16. The "mixed marriages" of Dresden were finally to be split up. Victor Klemperer regarded this as a death sentence for himself and the others. Then, "on the evening of February 13 the catastrophe overtook Dresden: the bombs fell, the houses collapsed, the phosphorus flowed, the burning beams crashed onto the heads of Aryans and non-Aryans alike, and Jew and Christian met death in the same firestorm; whoever of the bearers of the star was spared by this night was delivered, for in the general chaos he could escape the Gestapo." Victor Klemperer and the other Jews who survived the Allied raid and the subsequent firestorm had experienced a double miracle, had been doubly lucky.

In the confusion following the destruction of the city, Victor Klemperer pulled off the yellow Jew's star, and he and his wife merged with the other inhabitants fleeing the city. It was easy enough for them to claim they had lost their papers. Nevertheless, afraid of being recognized and denounced, they went on the run across Germany for the next three months, until the village they had reached in southern Bavaria was occupied by American forces.

Contradictions

On the night of the Dresden firestorm, when Victor Klemperer escaped both the Allied bombs and the Gestapo, he was already sixty-three. He was born in 1881, the youngest child of Wilhelm Klemperer, rabbi in the little town of Landsberg on the Warthe (today the Polish town of Gorzow Wielkopolski), in the eastern part of the Prussian province of Brandenburg. Three brothers and four sisters survived into adulthood; the famous conductor Otto Klemperer was a cousin, but there was little contact between the two parts of the family. By the time Victor was nine, his father, after an unhappy interlude with the Orthodox congregation at Bromberg (today Bydgoszcz), had been appointed second preacher of the Berlin Reform Congregation. The whole family appears to have felt relieved at the change, and according to his autobiography, Victor immediately relished the freedom and excitement of the big city.

Observance at the Reform Synagogue was extremely liberal. The services themselves were conducted almost entirely in German, and on a Sunday, heads were not covered, and men and women sat together. There was no bar mitzvah; instead, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, boys and girls were confirmed together on Easter Sunday. There were neither Sabbath restrictions nor dietary proscriptions. The sermons seem, to some degree, to have expressed the ethical tradition of the German Enlightenment. In other words, services approximated Protestant practice, and Judaism here became as rational and progressive as it could be while retaining a Jewish identity. This was not the norm of Jewish congregations, but it is nevertheless exemplary of a tradition of merging with the dominant culture. The Reform Synagogue can perhaps be regarded as something of a halfway house to conversion to Protestantism, which had become common in Prussia since the early nineteenth century. (The parents of Karl Marx and Felix Mendelssohn were among only the most prominent examples; conversion, of course, remained for a long time a condition of state service.) Wilhelm Klemperer raised little objection when his own sons were baptized as Protestants. Indeed, Victor Klemperer's three elder brothers seem to have gone out of their way to deny their Jewish origins. The biographical note prefacing the doctoral thesis of Georg Klemperer, the oldest brother, begins with the words, "I was born the son of a country cleric."

Georg Klemperer, sixteen years Victor's senior, was only in his thirties by the time he had become a noted surgeon and one of Germany's most respected medical men. Felix and Berthold Klemperer were also successful, the former as a doctor, the latter as a lawyer. Berthold even married a general's daughter. The sisters were much less free and had Jewish husbands more or less chosen for them.

Wearying of school and perhaps even more of the tyranny of Georg, who dominated the family after the move to Berlin, Victor Klemperer did not continue into the upper grades. He became a commercial apprentice in a company that exported trinkets and souvenirs for sale in English seaside resorts. This move seems to have convinced the eldest brother of Victor's lack of ability and determination. Victor Klemperer was never to shake off the feeling that his brother condescended to him and regarded him as a dilettante.

The apprenticeship, at any rate, did not lead anywhere. Victor Klemperer had entered it with dreams of future independence. Within three years, however, intellectual and literary interests gained the upper hand; he also became a passionate theatergoer. (It was during this period, in his seventeenth year, that he began to keep a diary.) He went back to school, attending the same grammar school in Landsberg as his brothers, and lived in lodgings in the town. This time he completed his schooling and became primus in his final year-something like head prefect.

He then enrolled at Munich University to study literature and languages and was increasingly drawn to French literature. He spent terms in Geneva and Paris before returning to Berlin to complete the first part of his university studies. It was in Geneva that he discovered Voltaire as a writer and found his own spirit of tolerant skepticism confirmed. "Ferney [where Voltaire lived in exile from France] was the best thing about Geneva," Klemperer later wrote, and the visit to Voltaire's house was like a pilgrimage.
Victor Klemperer had now found his way intellectually, but a commitment to a figure like Voltaire was unlikely to make for a smooth academic career. Before 1914, the study of Romance literatures and culture in German universities was dominated by hostility to the "superficial" ideas of the French Enlightenment. In fact, Klemperer was unable to find a suitable professor with whom to undertake a doctoral thesis on Voltaire and, to his brothers' consternation, threw up his studies once again. For the next few years, from 1905, he tried to make a living as a writer and literary journalist. At this point it may be worth noting that, for all the scholarliness he was to display in the future, Klemperer never seems to have felt really comfortable with other academics, even liberal ones, or in conventional middle-class settings in general. Although he loved teaching, he did not deal very well with the social aspects of his profession. In his diaries he often appears more at ease with "practical" people or with craftsmen.

Relations with several of his siblings went from bad to worse with Klemperer's romance with Eva Schlemmer, a musician from a Protestant family in Königsberg. They married in 1906. The wedding did not find favor with either family-on Eva's side because some of her relatives objected to her marrying a Jew, on Victor's side because his brothers did not consider her a good enough match. Nevertheless, Victor Klemperer was to share his life with her for the next forty-five years. And in this marriage, "share" is the appropriate word. In a speech on the occasion of Klemperer's seventy-fifth birthday in 1957, the couple's longtime friend Auguste "Gusti" Lazar, who appears in the diaries under her married name Wieghardt, said, "What especially fascinated me about the two Klemperers, was the 'community of intellectual property' in which they lived and worked."

In his autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, Klemperer wrote that as a young man he had been convinced of the justice of women's emancipation. Whatever difficulties in the relationship are evident and implied from the diaries and given that Victor Klemperer's writing and then academic career took precedence, it is clear that every aspect of intellectual and political life was subjected to intense discussion.

Having abandoned the university and living in Berlin once more, Klemperer demonstrated a tremendous energy in producing poems, stories, anthologies, articles, reviews, and biographies, largely on contemporary German themes. One of his most reliable sources of income came from lectures on literary subjects that he gave to Jewish societies throughout Germany, though it was in fact toward the end of this period that he converted fully to Protestantism. The young couple had a particular enthusiasm for the cinema and, in addition to a number of shorter pieces, Victor Klemperer wrote a study of Berlin film theaters and their audiences. It was also at this time that he became friends with Siegfried "Friedel" Kracauer, later to become famous for his writings on film and as a cultural historian and theorist. They lost touch during the First World War.

It was a struggle to make ends meet in Berlin's literary world. Nevertheless, Der Kinematograph, of September 25, 1912, as part of a feature entitled "The Cinema in the Opinion of Prominent Contemporaries," introduced Victor Klemperer in the following terms: "A young combative literary man who writes with rare courage and is not afraid to speak out against established authorities."

Inclination, as well as the need to make a living, pushed Klemperer toward literary journalism, which he clearly practiced with some success. He did not, however, make his mark as an author. He judged his efforts to be failures, later even refusing a publisher's offer to reprint one of his stories. Subsequently, he also had mixed feelings about his freelance years altogether, not least because he never quite managed to shake off the accusation or suspicion that his scholarly work still had something journalistic about it.

Incidentally, although Klemperer was undoubtedly progressive in his views, his "bohemian phase" did nothing to modify a lifelong aversion to bohemian lifestyles, and he retained an enduring suspicion of long hair and extravagant dress.

Return to University

Klemperer concluded that a doctorate would, if nothing else, enhance his position as a journalist. Financially supported by his brothers once again, he returned to Munich, found a sympathetic professor and in 1913 quickly completed a dissertation on Friedrich Spielhagen, a nineteenth-century German novelist. Spielhagen had been a liberal-democratic supporter of the ideals of the 1848 revolutions and was one of the favorite writers of Klemperer's father. In Munich, Victor Klemperer also made the acquaintance of Karl Vossler, a liberal professor of Romance literature and language. For all the differences-and resentments, not always justified, on Klemperer's side-that emerged later, Vossler was to remain an abiding influence. Klemperer wrote a postdoctoral habilitation thesis (in Germany a habilitation thesis is a condition for professional appointment) on Montesquieu. In it he argued for Montesquieu to be seen as a writer as well as a theorist or philosopher and that esthetic criteria were of determining importance in the composition of the latter's major works. This dissertation too was completed very rapidly, and with the distinction summa cum laude. Then, in 1914, as he was turning the Montesquieu study into a book, he accepted a post as lecturer in German literature at the University of Naples, although still continuing as one of Vossler's assistants.

War

Finally at ten o'clock we were sitting in the garden of the Hotel "Zur Sonne" [in Riva, then in Austria]. It was June 28. The waiter came running toward us and cried out: "The heir to the throne and his consort have been murdered in Sarajevo!" I said regretfully: "Oh!" and added with an apologetic smile: "But we are dreadfully hungry."

What was to become known as the First World War began just as Victor and Eva Klemperer had returned to Munich for the summer from Naples. In 1940, when Klemperer was working on his autobiography, he chose to interrupt the narrative at this point. Not to falsify his own responses, he simply let his diary entries speak for his mood in the weeks immediately preceding and following the outbreak of hostilities. From these it appears that although he was not carried away by bellicose sentiments, he was convinced, as a good liberal and patriot, that Germany's cause was a just one. He nevertheless returned to his post in Naples, where he remained until shortly before Italy entered the war on the Allied side in May 1915.

Back in Munich, Klemperer was declared fit for military service-he had been rejected in 1903-and was enlisted as a cannoneer in the Bavarian field artillery. He saw duty on the Western Front from November 1915 to March 1916 before succumbing to serious illness and being hospitalized. (His front-line service would be a source of "privilege" during the Third Reich.) Klemperer was out of danger for the rest of the war. Following convalescence, he was transferred to the army's book censorship office on the eastern front, working first in Kovno (now Kaunas) in Lithuania, then in Leipzig, where he was allowed to live in private accommodations with his wife.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Modern Library; Modern Library Edition (November 15, 1999)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 544 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0375753788
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0375753787
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.25 x 1.22 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #99,032 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #33 in Historical Germany Biographies
- #198 in Jewish Holocaust History
- #4,313 in Memoirs (Books)

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Gary Scott

Pulls You In, Grabs You & Doesn't Let Go

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 18, 2020

Verified Purchase

WW2, the Holocaust and history in general during that era are great interests of mine; I even spent five weeks in Germany partly to try and figure out how all of this could have happened in a country so advanced, educated and "civilized" as that one was.

This interest recently led me to the Victor Klemperer diaries and I immediately ordered the first two published volumes that have been published in English (there are five altogether, but only the last three are available in English, covering the years 1933-1959, I believe).

As I dove into the first volume, I thought to myself "oh, I made a mistake here - I may not make it through this." The entries were full of minutiae about daily life and loads of complaint. Klemperer was something of a hypochondriac and his entries throughout are filled with health fears and complaints, both real and imagined. Hitler is just coming into power as this first volume begins, and the Nazi's gradual imposition onto daily life is noted with increasing frequency as the entries progress. The first third or more of the notations concern the struggles in building his first house, learning to drive at a rather advanced age, and (hilariously) his early driving excursions, never exceeding 30 mph!

And then, of course, the Nazi noose begins to tighten on Jews unfortunate enough to be living in Germany: the wearing of the star, the destruction of businesses and houses of worship, the new bans weekly: no access to public parks, to transportation, to theaters and stores; the daily terror of simply walking down the street, the taunts from schoolchildren and the elderly alike . . . and, of course, the calls up for transport, where people are forced onto a train and disappear into Poland. He also captures the good side of the German character, the quiet expressions of personal support and hatred of the Nazi regime many Germans carried during those years.

The further you read, the more you want to read - these are very difficult books to put down. This sense of suspense is heightened by the fact that we know how this story progresses; we read here with a sense of dramatic irony, knowing what Klemperer cannot know as he composes these entries. We DO know that he survives, as the man lived until 1960, but once you are in the depth of reading these books it is virtually impossible to imagine how the heck he is going to manage to survive. Most of the very colorful characters he introduces us to along the way do not. It is, in many ways, a very tragic book - but it is a tragedy composed of daily, incremental loss and despair.

It should be noted that Victor Klemperer was a Linguistics Professor before and after the war, and his pages are filled with a love of language. Indeed, he charts the progression of Nazi propaganda language with an academic's eye for detail, hilariously and rather accurately comparing the Nazi proclamations to American advertising. Klemperer was born Jewish but is not observant and, indeed, married a non-Jewish "Aryan" woman. This - and the fact that he was a decorated vet from WW1 - largely serves as a partial shield from many of the early deportations and other actions. I would urge you to not read the Preface of these books, in which they recount the circumstances surrounding his survival during the end-days of the Nazi regime. This is an incredibly dramatic story and one I wish I hadn't known beforehand, when starting these volumes.

Ultimately, the Victor Klemperer Diaries are an intimate, horrific and very personal look into what it was to be Jewish in Nazi-controlled Germany during WW2. I am reading these books and writing this review as we sit in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis, and I have found that Victor's experience gives me enormous and very helpful perspective during this current time of fear and "hardship" - but I would recommend these volumes most highly at any time you care to read them. I have enjoyed (strange word, I know) these books so much that I have ordered the third volume, which covers the post war years, simply because I am not yet ready to leave this author just yet.
I want to see his story through to the end.

Victor Klemperer has become something of a national hero in Germany since these volumes first published in the mid-90's. Germany's largest cities now have streets named after him, the books have spawned films and plays and broadcasts, and decades after his death he has become something of a national hero. Since the translations, his fame and these precious recordings (which were bravely hidden away in a German woman's home throughout the war - discovery of these writings would have lead to her & many other executions) have become essential reading for anyone interested in the Jewish experience during the war years.

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Daniel Abraham

Interesting diary from an unlikeable author

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 5, 2022

Verified Purchase

Quite fascinating diary, somewhat despite itself. Despite being an edited version of the original German text, it is repetitive and often focuses on Klemperer's personal ailments and petty complaints about neighbors.

His focus on the small daily events is in its way interesting, as it shows people's reaction as events unfolded - denial, hope, despair, and adjustment to the ever-increasing tightening vise of the Nazi regime and its racial laws.

The main problem I had with this book is how unlikable Klemperer appears. He is a self-centered, judgmental, prejudiced, ungrateful character, and one wonders what his actions would have been had he not be labeled a Jew by the Nazis.

The son of a Rabbi, Klemperer converted to Protestantism, and cut off all connections to Judaism. The few mentions he makes about Judaism betray his distaste and uneasiness about his origins. Although categorized "non-Aryan" as a "racial Jew" under Nazi laws, he was - as a former WW1 soldier married to an "Aryan" - in a much better situation than most other Jew. Yet he never once mentions that others have it worse than him, instead claiming that things are worse for him because he doesn't have a community to belong to and is alone.

The November 22 1938 entry is a shocking illustration of his mindset:
"Misfortune followed misfortune, one could say catastrophe: first illness, then the car accident, then the Grünspan shooting business in Paris, there came persecution, then the struggle to immigrate. [...] an ordinary influenza, following that a quite unfamiliar bladder complaint, even more horrid aneurysm." What is shocking here is his mention of "the Grünspan shooting business". A few pages later he complains that he is "hit hard" because he is not allowed to drive anymore.
Not a single word about the event that came right before "the Grünspan shooting business" - the deportation of 17 000 Polish Jews on October 28. As a German, he has absolutely no interest in the fate of the "Ostjuden" (a single brief mention about a family of "Galician-looking" Jews in 450 pages).

Despite the increasingly difficult situation, he remains steadfast in being German before everything else.
1935: "Where do I belong? To the "Jewish nation" decrees Hitler. And I feel the Jewish nation [...] is a comedy and am nothing but a German or German European".

Most baffling is his continuous equating of Zionism with Nazism:
1934: "to me the Zionists [...] are just as offensive as the Nazis"
1935: "[...] Zionism [...] which I call betrayal and Hitlerism"
1939: "[having a] Jewish state somewhere in the world [...] is pure Nazism and just as odious to me as it is to [my wife]"
1939: "[... The] Zionist cause [...] seems complete madness to me. [...] The German Jews concerned are committing a crime [...] if they agree to this game".
1939, November: "The Jewish communities in Germany today are all extremely inclined to Zionism; I shall go along with that just as little as I do with National Socialism or with Bolshevism. Liberal and German *forever*. (emphasized).
(After the end of WW2, Klemperer will remain in the DDR and join the Communist party, not out of conviction, but out of convenience for his career. One can't help but wonder if, given the chance, he would have done the same with the NSDAP.)

But that is not all. He displays no love for his own family:
His brother Georg regularly sends him badly needed money from abroad, and amount equal to Klemperer's yearly pension, yet he expresses more resentment than gratitude.
He later learns that his brother Georg, who was trying to get him a visa to the US, had a stroke. Klemperer notes: "Emotion? Hardly any. Consequence for me? Emigration to the USA even more difficult than before."

His ailing sister Grete needs to be moved to a Jewish boarding house. Klemperer: "It was no pleasant errand for me: I am Protestant, my sister is Jewish". Not a word of concern for her even though her situation is much more difficult than his.

If you are interested in getting a sense of what daily life was like in Nazi Germany, you may find this book a rather fascinating read. Be warned that 1) his case was atypical (converted Jew married to a non-Jew), 2) you may get bored by the endless repetitions, and 3) grow annoyed by Klemperer's character - Anne Frank's diary this certainly isn't.

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J F G Shearmur

Interesting, but under-edited, long-winded and odd

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 14, 2020

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Klemperer's diaries are interesting, but seem to me badly ujnder-edited, in the sense that the book would have been improved by the addition of full editorial footnotes which explained what the developments were to which he was reacting. He was, late on, badly affected by horrible legislation directed against day-to-day aspects of the life of Jews. But just what were these? Their content is seldom fully clear from what he writes, and they are things which would only be known to experts on the period.

What happened to him - and to other Jews over this period - was terrible. But he seemed to make a mess of things all on his own. He regularly undertook expenditure which he could not afford. He was assisted by gifts from his brother, concerning which he seemed miserably ungenerous. And he claimed that he was not in a position to move - when lots of people were begging him to do so - when it was clear that he had linguistic skills which would have made moving a real possibility.

All told, having such a detailed account is really valuable. But it seemed to me in some ways spoiled by the fact that the author was complaining almost as much at the start, as he was whyen facing really terrible things at the end.

Sally

Remarkable insight into real daily life's struggle

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 17, 2019

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My feed back is the same for this book, as it is i gave for the follow on book. I can honestly say that i got engrossed with every page the more i read the angrier i could feel myself getting. To loss everything bit by bit not knowing from one day to the next what new decree would be announced. I know i wouldnt survive living in a environment like that .

Your Aunt Martha

Day by day in Dresden 1942-45

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 6, 2015

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These were recommended by a reader of history in the family. I have read both volumes and believe my understanding of the period is greatly expanded. These volumes were gifts to another reader of history in the family who requested them. I think that makes 3 recommendations.

Klemperer describes events and his own experiences but especially the language used by the regime to inculcate (sic) the Nazi world view. The repeated lie becomes, if not true, at least indisputable.

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Bill Phipps

Pre war experiences of a German Jew in Dresden

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 30, 2012

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How easily can ervil creep up on you without you really noticing. That's how the Nazis employed their anti-Jewish policies....little by little. Exclusion, expropriation, expulsion, execution......simple.

William John Watkins

Another Klemperer

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 16, 2012

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I appreciate the accuracy of product description; prompt delivery also scores highly. The diaries themselves are unique, I suspect, and permit a slow absorption of their Zeitgeist

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