- Klemperer, Victor.
I Will Bear Witness. Vol. 2.
New York: Modern Library, [1942–1945, 1995, 1999] 2001.
ISBN 978-0-375-75697-9.
-
This is the second volume in Victor Klemperer's diaries
of life as a Jew in Nazi Germany.
Volume 1 (February 2009)
covers the years from 1933 through 1941, in which the
Nazis seized and consolidated their power, began to
increasingly persecute the Jewish population, and
rearm in preparation for their military conquests which
began with the invasion of Poland in September 1939.
I described that book as “simultaneously tedious,
depressing, and profoundly enlightening”. The author (a
cousin of the conductor Otto Klemperer) was a respected
professor of Romance languages and literature at the Technical
University of Dresden when Hitler came to power in 1933.
Although the son of a Reform rabbi, Klemperer had been baptised
in a Christian church and considered himself a protestant
Christian and entirely German. He volunteered for the German
army in World War I and served at the front in the artillery and
later, after recovering from a serious illness, in the army book
censorship office on the Eastern front. As a fully assimilated
German, he opposed all appeals to racial identity politics,
Zionist as well as Nazi.
Despite his conversion to protestantism, military service
to Germany, exalted rank as a professor, and decades of
marriage to a woman deemed “Aryan”
under the racial laws promulgated by the
Nazis, Klemperer was considered a “full-blooded
Jew” and was subject to ever-escalating harassment,
persecution, humiliation, and expropriation as the Nazis
tightened their grip on Germany. As civil society
spiralled toward barbarism, Klemperer lost his job, his car,
his telephone, his house, his freedom of movement, the
right to shop in “Aryan stores”, access to
public and lending libraries, and even the typewriter on
which he continued to write in the hope of maintaining his
sanity. His world shrank from that of a cosmopolitan
professor fluent in many European languages to a single
“Jews' house” in Dresden, shared with other
once-prosperous families similarly evicted from their homes.
As 1942 begins, it is apparent to many in German, even Jews
deprived of the “privilege” of reading newspapers
and listening to the radio, not to mention foreign broadcasts,
that the momentum of German conquest in the East had stalled and
that the Soviet winter counterattack had begun to push the
ill-equipped and -supplied German troops back from the lines
they held in the fall of 1941. This was reported with
euphemisms such as “shortening our line”, but it was
obvious to everybody that the Soviets, not long ago reported
breathlessly as “annihilated”, were nothing of the
sort and that the Nazi hope of a quick victory in the East, like
the fall of France in 1940, was not in the cards.
In Dresden, where Klemperer and his wife Eva remained
after being forced out of their house (to which, in
formalism-obsessed Germany, he retained title and
responsibility for maintenance), Jews were subjected
to a never-ending ratchet of abuse, oppression, and
terror. Klemperer was forced to wear the yellow star
(concealing it meant immediate arrest and likely
“deportation” to the concentration camps
in the East) and was randomly abused by strangers on
the street (but would get smiles and quiet words of
support from others), with each event shaking or
bolstering his confidence in those who, before Hitler,
he considered his “fellow Germans”.
He is prohibited from riding the tram, and must walk
long distances, avoiding crowded streets where the
risk of abuse from passers-by was greater. Another
blow falls when Jews are forbidden to use the public
library. With his typewriter seized long ago, he can
only pursue his profession with pen, ink, and whatever
books he can exchange with other Jews, including those
left behind by those “deported”. As
ban follows ban, even the simplest things such as getting
shoes repaired, obtaining coal to heat the house,
doing laundry, and securing food to eat become major
challenges. Jews are subject to random “house
searches” by the Gestapo, in which the discovery
of something like his diaries might mean immediate
arrest—he arranges to store the work with an
“Aryan” friend of Eva, who deposits pages
as they are completed. The house searches
in many cases amount to pure shakedowns, where
rationed and difficult-to-obtain goods such as
butter, sugar, coffee, and tobacco, even if purchased
with the proper coupons, are simply stolen by the
Gestapo goons.
By this time every Jew knows individuals and families who have
been “deported”, and the threat of joining them is
ever present. Nobody seems to know precisely what is going on
in those camps in the East (whose names are known: Auschwitz,
Dachau, Theresienstadt, etc.) but what is obvious is that nobody
sent there has ever been seen again. Sometimes relatives
receive a letter saying the deportee died of disease in the
camp, which seemed plausible, while others get notices their loved
one was “killed while trying to escape”, which was
beyond belief in the case of elderly prisoners who had
difficulty walking. In any case, being “sent East”
was considered equivalent to a death sentence which, for most,
it was. As a war veteran and married to an “Aryan”,
Klemperer was more protected than most Jews in Germany, but
there was always the risk that the slightest infraction might
condemn him to the camps. He knew many others who had been
deported shortly after the death of their Aryan wives.
As the war in the East grinds on, it becomes increasingly
clear that Germany is losing. The back-and-forth campaign
in North Africa was first to show cracks in the Nazi
aura of invincibility, but after the disaster at Stalingrad
in the winter of 1942–1943, it is obvious the situation
is dire. Goebbels proclaims “total war”, and
all Germans begin to feel the privation brought on by the
war. The topic on everybody's lips in whispered, covert
conversations is “How long can it go on?” With
each reverse there are hopes that perhaps a military coup
will depose the Nazis and seek peace with the Allies.
For Klemperer, such grand matters of state and history are
of relatively little concern. Much more urgent are obtaining
the necessities of life which, as the economy deteriorates
and oppression of the Jews increases, often amount to coal
to stay warm and potatoes to eat, hauled long distances
by manual labour. Klemperer, like all able-bodied Jews
(the definition of which is flexible: he suffers from heart
disease and often has difficulty walking long distances or
climbing stairs, and has vision problems as well) is assigned
“war work”, which in his case amounts to menial
labour tending machines producing stationery and envelopes
in a paper factory. Indeed, what appear in retrospect as
the pivotal moments of the war in Europe: the battles of
Stalingrad and Kursk, Axis defeat and evacuation of North
Africa, the fall of Mussolini and Italy's leaving the
Axis, the Allied D-day landings in Normandy, the assassination
plot against Hitler, and more almost seem to occur off-stage
here, with news filtering in bit by bit after the fact
and individuals trying to piece it together and make
sense of it all.
One event which is not off stage is the
bombing
of Dresden between February 13 and 15, 1945. The Klemperers
were living at the time in the Jews' house they shared with
several other families, which was located some distance from the
city centre. There was massive damage in the area, but it was
outside the firestorm which consumed the main targets. Victor
and Eva became separated in the chaos, but were reunited near
the end of the attack. Given the devastation and collapse of
infrastructure, Klemperer decided to bet his life on the hope
that the attack would have at least temporarily put the Gestapo
out of commission and removed the yellow star, discarded all
identity documents marking him as a Jew, and joined the mass of
refugees, many also without papers, fleeing the ruins of
Dresden. He and Eva made their way on what remained of the
transportation system toward Bavaria and eastern Germany, where
they had friends who might accommodate them, at least
temporarily. Despite some close calls, the ruse worked, and
they survived the end of the war, fall of the Nazi regime, and
arrival of United States occupation troops.
After a period in which he discovered that the American
occupiers, while meaning well, were completely overwhelmed
trying to meet the needs of the populace amid the ruins,
the Klemperers decided to make it on their own back to
Dresden, which was in the Soviet zone of occupation, where
they hoped their house still stood and would be restored
to them as their property. The book concludes with a
description of this journey across ruined Germany and
final arrival at the house they occupied before the Nazis
came to power.
After the war, Victor Klemperer was appointed a professor
at the University of Leipzig and resumed his academic
career. As political life resumed in what was then the
Soviet sector and later East Germany, he joined the
Socialist Unity Party of Germany, which is usually
translated to English as the East German Communist Party
and was under the thumb of Moscow. Subsequently, he became
a cultural ambassador of sorts for East Germany. He seems
to have been a loyal communist, although in his later
diaries he expressed frustration at the impotence of the
“parliament” in which he was a delegate
for eight years. Not to be unkind to somebody who survived
as much oppression and adversity as he did, but he didn't
seem to have much of a problem with a totalitarian, one party,
militaristic, intrusive surveillance, police state as long
as it wasn't directly persecuting him.
The author was a prolific diarist who wrote thousands of
pages from the early 1900s throughout his
long life. The original 1995 German publication of the
1933–1945 diaries as
Ich will Zeugnis
ablegen bis zum letzten
was a substantial abridgement of the original document
and even so ran to almost 1700 pages. This English
translation further abridges the diaries and still
often seems repetitive. End notes provide historical
context, identify the many people who figure in the diary,
and translate the foreign phrases the author liberally
sprinkles among the text.
December 2019 