- Klemperer, Victor.
I Will Bear Witness. Vol. 1.
New York: Modern Library, [1933–1941, 1995] 1998.
ISBN 978-0-375-75378-7.
-
This book is 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.
His family and acquaintances dwindle as, one after another,
they opt for emigration, leaving only the author and his
wife still in Germany (due to lack of
opportunities, but also to an inertia and sense of
fatalism evident in the narrative). Slowly the author's
sense of Germanness dissipates as he comes to believe that
what is happening in Germany is not an aberration but somehow
deeply rooted in the German character, and that Hitler embodies
beliefs widespread among the population which were previously invisible
before becoming so starkly manifest. Klemperer is
imprisoned for eight days in 1941 for a blackout violation
for which a non-Jew would have received a warning or a
small fine, and his prison journal, written a few days
after his release, is a matter of fact portrayal of how
an encounter with the all-powerful and arbitrary state
reduces the individual to a mental servitude more pernicious
than physical incarceration.
I have never read any book which provides such a visceral
sense of what it is like to live in a totalitarian
society and how quickly all notions of justice,
rights, and human dignity can evaporate when a
charismatic leader is empowered by a mob in thrall to
his rhetoric. Apart from the description of the persecution
the author's family and acquaintances suffered
themselves, he turns a keen philologist's eye on
the
language of the Third Reich, and observes how the
corruption of the regime is reflected in the corruption
of the words which make up its propaganda.
Ayn Rand's fictional (although to some extent autobiographical)
We the Living provides a similar
sense of life under tyranny, but this is the real thing,
written as events happened, with no knowledge of how it was
all going to come out, and is, as a consequence, uniquely
compelling. Klemperer wrote these diaries with no intention
of their being published: they were, at most, the raw material
for an autobiography he hoped eventually to write, so when
you read these words you're perceiving how a Jew in Nazi Germany
perceived life day to day, and how what historians consider epochal
events in retrospect are quite naturally interpreted by those hearing
of them for the first time in the light of “What does this mean
for me?”
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.
I will certainly read Volume 2,
which covers the years 1942–1945, but probably not
right away—after this powerful narrative, I'm
inclined toward lighter works for a while.
February 2009 