Victor Klemperer (1881–1960)
Author of I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933-1941
About the Author
Victor Klemperer (1881-1960) became Professor of French Literature at Dresden University.
Image credit: Victor Klemperer, en 1946
Series
Works by Victor Klemperer
The Language of the Third Reich: LTI -- Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist's Notebook (1947) — Author — 815 copies, 18 reviews
Die Sprache des Dritten Reiches. Beobachtungen und Reflexionen aus LTI: Mit einem Essay von Heinrich Detering. [Was bedeutet das alles?] (Reclams Universal-Bibliothek ... [Was… (2020) — Author — 8 copies
Victor Klemperer. Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten. 2 Bände: Tagebücher 1933-1941 und Tagebücher 1942-1945 (2015) 1 copy
I Will Bear Witness 1 copy
By Victor Klemperer Language of the Third Reich: LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii (Bloomsbury Revelations) [Paperback] (2014) 1 copy
Ich Will Zeugnis Ablegen Bis Zum Letzten Tagebucher 1933-41 & Tagebucher 1942-1945 VOL I & II (1998) 1 copy
第三帝国的语言：一个语文学者的笔记 1 copy
2007 1 copy
Tagebücher 1950 - 1959 1 copy
Tagebücher Juni 1945 - 1949 1 copy
Associated Works
The Assassin's Cloak: An Anthology of the World's Greatest Diarists (2000) — Contributor, some editions — 623 copies, 9 reviews
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1881-10-09
- Date of death
- 1960-02-11
- Gender
- male
- Education
- University of Geneva
- Occupations
- journalist
professor of literature
philologist
Holocaust survivor
diarist - Organizations
- Technische Universität Dresden
- Awards and honors
- Geschwister-Scholl-Preis (1995)
- Relationships
- Klemperer, Werner (cousin)
- Short biography
- Victor Klemperer was a journalist and professor of literature, specializing in the French Enlightenment, at the Technische Universität Dresden. His diaries detailing his life under successive German states — the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic — were published to great acclaim in 1995. His recollections on the Third Reich in particular have become a standard historical source. Prof. Klemperer was born into a Jewish family, and despite his conversion to Christianity, he was stripped by the Nazis of his academic title, job, and German citizenship by 1935. He was forced to work in a factory and as a day laborer. Because his wife Eva was considered Aryan, Prof. Klemperer avoided deportation for most of World War II. On February 13, 1945, the day preceding the now-famous night bombing of Dresden, he helped to deliver deportation notices to some of the last remaining Jews in the city. Fearing that he would soon be sent to his death as well, he used the confusion created by the Allied bombings that night to remove his yellow star, join a refugee column, and escape with his wife into American-controlled territory. After the war, Prof. Klemperer went on to become an important cultural figure in East Germany, lecturing at the universities of Greifswald, Berlin and Halle.
- Nationality
- Germany
- Birthplace
- Landsberg an der Warthe, Germany
- Places of residence
- Dresden, Germany
- Place of death
- Dresden, Germany
- Burial location
- Dresden, Germany
- Associated Place (for map)
- Dresden, Germany
Members
Reviews
In the first installment of I Will Bear Witness Klemperer spent a great deal of time worrying about his health and borrowing money from one of his siblings. He stressed constantly about being in debt and dying of a heart attack. He didn't know which was worse. In the second installment, as the Gestapo power grows crueler and crueler, Klemperer's worries shift from paying the bills to getting enough food to eat and being "arrested" or called to the concentration camps. He is helpless with show more despair as he hears of dogcatching soldiers who are actually hunting Jews. Terror reins when friends are arrested and then shot "trying to escape", and worse. Those unwilling to meet an unpredictable fate take matters into their own hands by committing suicide. In the face of all this uncertainty, little by little Klemperer and his wife lose simple creature comforts. When they move into their third and smallest apartment Victor is shocked by the lack of privacy; the promiscuity of everyone living so close to one another. Then the bombs fall. This is probably the most revealing of Klemperer's diaries. How he and his wife escape is nothing short of miraculous. I held my breath through every page. show less
This is the second volume of Klemperer's diaries (you don't need to read them in order, but you ought to). It's January 1942. The war is swirling around him and the deportations have begun in earnest. One by one Klemperer's friends are arrested, deported or commit suicide; he himself expects to be picked up at any time and contemplates ending his life. But he is determined to live, to "bear witness" to the atrocities around him, the many greater and lesser agonies he and other Jews endure. show more He is reproached at one point by an acquaintance who tells him no one is going to care about the details he records, and Klemperer responds, "It's not the big things that are important to me, but the everyday life of tyranny, which gets forgotten. A thousand mosquito bites are worse than a blow to the head. I observe, note down the mosquito bites."
Curiously, Klemperer encounters a great deal of sympathy and friendliness from everyday Germans; many Aryan friends and acquaintances help in small ways, and strangers approach him on the street to tell him to bear up because it can't last forever. He writes, "Taken individually ninety-nine percent of the male and female workers are undoubtedly more or less extremely anti-Nazi, well-disposed to the Jews, opposed to the war, weary of tyranny..., but fear of the one percent loyal to the regime, fear of prison, ax, and bullet binds them."
Klemperer's description of the fire-bombing of Dresden was breathtaking. The bombing probably saved his life; the last of the Jews were being rounded up and he expected his turn to come any day now, but in the chaos that followed the attack on the city, he and his wife took the opportunity to take off his star, change their names and run like hell. So the reader follows them to their trek across Germany to the American occupation zone and safety. Then, after the armistice, their two-week journey back to Dresden (mostly on foot). The end of the war is not the end of their troubles, alas. But they reach Dresden and are well-received there, and will pick up their lives where they left off.
This is a very intelligent, observant and dedicated diarist, and these books are an inestimably important work of history. I look forward to reading the third and last volume, detailing Klemperer's life in post-war Communist Germany. show less
Curiously, Klemperer encounters a great deal of sympathy and friendliness from everyday Germans; many Aryan friends and acquaintances help in small ways, and strangers approach him on the street to tell him to bear up because it can't last forever. He writes, "Taken individually ninety-nine percent of the male and female workers are undoubtedly more or less extremely anti-Nazi, well-disposed to the Jews, opposed to the war, weary of tyranny..., but fear of the one percent loyal to the regime, fear of prison, ax, and bullet binds them."
Klemperer's description of the fire-bombing of Dresden was breathtaking. The bombing probably saved his life; the last of the Jews were being rounded up and he expected his turn to come any day now, but in the chaos that followed the attack on the city, he and his wife took the opportunity to take off his star, change their names and run like hell. So the reader follows them to their trek across Germany to the American occupation zone and safety. Then, after the armistice, their two-week journey back to Dresden (mostly on foot). The end of the war is not the end of their troubles, alas. But they reach Dresden and are well-received there, and will pick up their lives where they left off.
This is a very intelligent, observant and dedicated diarist, and these books are an inestimably important work of history. I look forward to reading the third and last volume, detailing Klemperer's life in post-war Communist Germany. show less
No matter how you dress it up, this is a hard book to read. Mainly because hindsight is 20/20 and we know what a travesty the Nazi years truly were to the German Jewish people. Today, reading Klemperer's journals are valuable lessons in fortitude, courage, and grace. Despite everything he remained committed to documenting his world around him...even as it slowly fell apart. At first the indignity was small, a blip: the loss of admittance to his library's reading room. No Jews allowed. Then, show more the indignities became too big to ignore - the loss of his teaching position at the university, then use of the beloved automobile, then they had to move from their new dream house. Every creature comfort was slowly stripped away. His typewriter, tobacco, even new socks. Can you imagine smoking blackberry tea or filling an application for used socks? What is so admirable is, in the face of all this humility, Klemperer still recognized and drew attention to the civility his enemy occasionally displayed.
From the very beginning, although he was only 52 years of age at the start of I Will Bear Witness, Klemperer was convinced he had not long to live. He made comments like, "I no longer think about tomorrow" (p 15), and "My heart cannot bear all this misery much longer" (p 17). He was sure his heart would give out any day. It was if each passing birthday came as a shock to him because he could see the future of Germany's political landscape. How would he survive it? Yet, every day he strove to improve his life and that of his wife of 45 years. Buying land, building a house, learning to drive a car, taking Eva to her beloved flower shows, keeping a diary and continuing to write throughout it all. These are the little triumphs of Klemperer's life. show less
From the very beginning, although he was only 52 years of age at the start of I Will Bear Witness, Klemperer was convinced he had not long to live. He made comments like, "I no longer think about tomorrow" (p 15), and "My heart cannot bear all this misery much longer" (p 17). He was sure his heart would give out any day. It was if each passing birthday came as a shock to him because he could see the future of Germany's political landscape. How would he survive it? Yet, every day he strove to improve his life and that of his wife of 45 years. Buying land, building a house, learning to drive a car, taking Eva to her beloved flower shows, keeping a diary and continuing to write throughout it all. These are the little triumphs of Klemperer's life. show less
Intellectually dismantling here the system put in place by Goebbels, Viktor Klemperer, scholar and diarist, also exposes its insidious impact upon the different parts of the population he was led to mix with. Lexical fields, neologism, outrageous uses of superlatives, words and expressions emptied out of their original meanings to be redefined through a purely ideological perspective only... The linguist portrays how Nazism will, over 12 years of dictatorship, penetrate German language to show more use it as a vehicle, simply to hijack the minds of German speakers.
Example abounds. Personally, I was particularly struck by the manipulation of the word 'fanatic'. 'Fanatic', from the Latin 'fanum' for 'sanctuary, temple', was first used by the philosophes to define those people who, blinded by their faith, only saw the world through their religious believes, that they also want to impose. By extension, the word later came to refer to anyone being so dogmatic that they are extremist, radicals, without any open mindedness nor critical thinking. As an enemy of reason, 'fanaticism', then, was a negative feature. The Nazis, though, would completely flip that around; to turn it into a positive asset! For them, to be a 'fanatic' was indeed to be fully faithful to their ideology, to the point of being willing to blindly follow the Fuhrer (even in death), something that they wanted to encourage. Abusing again and again, through their relentless propaganda, of the word 'fanatic' as a synonym for 'faithful', they would therefore contribute to empty such word of its negative connotation, while fuelling just such behaviour from individuals.
Engrossing, although a bit confusing at times (remember, this is a diary which was written secretly!) 'The Language of the Third Reich' is also a powerful testimony about what life was like for these Jews who hadn't fled Germany. It's also a striking lesson in bravery. Imagine indeed Viktor Klemperer, a man then in his sixties, ostracised, humiliated, persecuted, victims of all sorts of abuses, regularly beaten up by the Gestapo, assigned to a 'judenhaus' (he wasn't deported only because his wife was 'aryan') writing diligently in his diary, for a period of over 12 years, all the manipulations melted upon his native language by propagandists then in power, and exposing all the dreadful consequences of such manipulations upon society at large...
More than an intellectual barrier erected against groupthink and dogmatism, such a perseverance demonstrates, above all, the importance of critical thinking when confronted with buzzwords, catchphrases, slogans and other abuse of a language just so as to peddle an ideology. Absolutely fascinating. show less
Example abounds. Personally, I was particularly struck by the manipulation of the word 'fanatic'. 'Fanatic', from the Latin 'fanum' for 'sanctuary, temple', was first used by the philosophes to define those people who, blinded by their faith, only saw the world through their religious believes, that they also want to impose. By extension, the word later came to refer to anyone being so dogmatic that they are extremist, radicals, without any open mindedness nor critical thinking. As an enemy of reason, 'fanaticism', then, was a negative feature. The Nazis, though, would completely flip that around; to turn it into a positive asset! For them, to be a 'fanatic' was indeed to be fully faithful to their ideology, to the point of being willing to blindly follow the Fuhrer (even in death), something that they wanted to encourage. Abusing again and again, through their relentless propaganda, of the word 'fanatic' as a synonym for 'faithful', they would therefore contribute to empty such word of its negative connotation, while fuelling just such behaviour from individuals.
Engrossing, although a bit confusing at times (remember, this is a diary which was written secretly!) 'The Language of the Third Reich' is also a powerful testimony about what life was like for these Jews who hadn't fled Germany. It's also a striking lesson in bravery. Imagine indeed Viktor Klemperer, a man then in his sixties, ostracised, humiliated, persecuted, victims of all sorts of abuses, regularly beaten up by the Gestapo, assigned to a 'judenhaus' (he wasn't deported only because his wife was 'aryan') writing diligently in his diary, for a period of over 12 years, all the manipulations melted upon his native language by propagandists then in power, and exposing all the dreadful consequences of such manipulations upon society at large...
More than an intellectual barrier erected against groupthink and dogmatism, such a perseverance demonstrates, above all, the importance of critical thinking when confronted with buzzwords, catchphrases, slogans and other abuse of a language just so as to peddle an ideology. Absolutely fascinating. show less
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