The Conscience of Words

“On Friday morning, 1st September, the young butcher’s lad came and told us: There has been a wireless announcement, we already held Danzig and the Corridor, the war with Poland was underway, England and France remained neutral. I said to Eva, then a morphine injection or something similar was the best thing for us. Our life was over.” This is how, on Sept. 3, 1939, Victor Klemperer started recording the first days of Germany’s attack on Poland, the beginning of World War II.

Would the English and the French stand by their ally? In his diary Klemperer eagerly noted every comment: “I asked several people whether English neutrality had already been declared. Only an intelligent salesgirl in a cigar shop on Chemnitzer Platz said: No--that would really be a joke! At the baker’s, at Vogel’s, they all said, as good as declared, all over in a few days! A young man in front of the newspaper display: The English are cowards, they won’t do anything! And thus with variations the general mood, vox populi (butter seller, newspaper man, bill collector of the gas company, etc. etc.).”

Victor Klemperer was a Jew by birth (the son of a rabbi), who as a young adult converted to Protestantism, married a non-Jewish German woman and, after somewhat checkered beginnings, settled down in Dresden as professor of Romance languages at the Technical University. Culturally and psychologically, Klemperer was quintessentially German. The Nazis turned him into a Jew, whether he liked it or not. In 1935, he lost his teaching position at the university but remained in Dresden with his wife (and their cat, as long as the Nazis permitted Jews to keep pets). Pure chance and possibly the fact that they were a “mixed couple” delayed the Klemperers’ deportation to an extermination camp. They survived the bombing of Dresden and the destruction of the city in February 1945. Both then fled to Bavaria, where they awaited the arrival of the Americans and the end of the war. Thus, during the entire Nazi regime, Klemperer was witness to the fate of his own people, the Jews, but also--as an insider in many ways--to what went on at the many levels of surrounding society, the Germans of Dresden and beyond.

The diary that Klemperer kept during those years is possibly the most extraordinary one to have come out of that darkness; it will remain as one of the great testimonies of our century. The English translation, it should be added, reads beautifully. It is a pity, however, that a text already excerpted in its original German version was still further excerpted in its English rendition.

Klemperer was an obsessive diarist since 1905, with an uncanny grasp for the telling detail, the significant nuance. Moreover, he had a wonderful sense for the vagaries of language, thus becoming the first recorder and analyst of the grotesque perversion of the German tongue during the Nazi era. His “LTI” (Lingua Tertii Imperii), the “language of the Third Reich,” subtitled “The Notebook of a Philologist,” was published in 1947 and became a must for students of the Hitler regime. His diaries, however, kept in former East Germany, where he and his wife returned in June 1945 and where Klemperer died in 1960, remained inaccessible for half a century, possibly because of the anti-communist remarks they contained. When finally published in Berlin in 1995, they immediately became a sensation. Here was the world of the Jews in Germany during the Nazi era, chronicled at close range, but here also was the face of German society during those years, reflected in Klemperer’s mirror, a mirror held by the victims themselves.

Klemperer listened to everybody. His recording of the first day of the war is a typical illustration of his whole endeavor. When his freedom of movement was increasingly restricted, he gathered the hints, the rumors, the details that reached the “Jews’ house” in which he and his wife, Eva, were compelled to live. He knew about Auschwitz in the spring of 1942; he witnessed the gradual disappearance of the Jewish community of Dresden; he described the Gestapo forays into their “house” and chronicled the deportations. He was in the city when Dresden was reduced to ashes and described it a few days later.

The most poignant part of the diary is the yet untranslated “volume two,” which comprises the period from January 1942 to the end of the war. But, the first volume (from February 1933 to Dec. 31, 1941) is in and of itself a telling enough rendition of the growing horror of the times. Take an entry chosen at random, not describing any “unusual” events: Sunday, Feb. 20, 1941. First, Klemperer received the order to sell the car that he and his wife had still managed to acquire in the mid-’30s, and this notwithstanding the fact that he had not been allowed to drive it since the end of 1938 (in December of that year the Jews lost their driver’s licenses). A buyer was found, who would take it as scrap. “The next blow to be expected,” Klemperer then adds, “is the confiscation of the typewriter. There is one way of safeguarding it. It would have to be lent to me by an Aryan owner.” Theoretically there were some possible “lenders,” but they were afraid. “Everyone is afraid of arousing the least suspicion of being friendly to Jews; the fear seems to grow all the time.”

It was far from being all. February 1941, it should be stressed, was still considered “normal” time, months away from deportations and extermination. Normal, in a Nazi sense. Fragments of conversation picked up while eating at the [hotel] Monopol, Klemperer goes on in the same entry: “A girl who had been working for a year in some kind of administration office in Poland, on leave here, to her girlfriends, shootings were going on constantly, it was rarely in the papers. . . . Another girl about a third: she had been frozen out, ‘because too friendly with the Jews.’ ” Klemperer did not yet despair of getting out, to the United States: “Reichenbach, the official advisor on emigration, said to me yesterday our quota number, 56,400, will certainly be called up even before the end of the year. (Provided that the USA does not enter the war.)” All of this and a long analysis of current jokes about the war (jokes taken over and barely adapted from World War I) on that same ordinary day.

Klemperer’s ability to grasp moods and attitudes had a truly Dickensian quality. Tuesday, Sept. 2, 1941: “My mood and that in the Jews’ house changes daily, almost hourly. England has occupied Iran: Up. Will Turkey go with Germany? Down. We count how many people in the shops say ‘Heil Hitler’ and how many ‘Good afternoon.’ The ‘good morning’ or ‘good afternoon’ is said to be increasing. At Zscheischler’s bakery five women said ‘Good afternoon,’ two said ‘Heil Hitler.’ Up. At Olsner’s they all said, ‘Heil Hitler.’ Down. Katchen Sara happy yesterday. At the tram stop an NSV [NS-Volkswohlfahrt or National Socialist Volk Welfare] nurse said to her: ‘The Russians have blown up the Dnieper power station, southern Ukraine is flooded, thousands of Germans have drowned. It is not in the newspaper, it only writes about Russian prisoners . . . the war is lost. . . . I know what the mood is, I get around. Goodbye, madam!’--’Goodbye,’ not ‘Heil Hitler’--an NSV nurse! Up. But then comes the newspaper: Advance toward Leningrad! Down. Etc. etc.”

Beyond everyday life, Klemperer chronicled each step of the regime’s anti-Jewish policies, the laws, the decrees, the regulations. He commented on the first definition of who was a Jew (“one is an alien species or a Jew with 25% Jewish blood if one grandparent was Jewish. As in 15th century Spain, but then the issue was faith. Today it is zoology + business”) in April 1933, on the multitude of indignities of the mid-’30s, the Nuremberg racial laws of September 1935. There was one exception though: The pogrom of Nov. 9 and 10, 1938, the so-called Night of Broken Glass, Klemperer mentioned it only by the way, almost two weeks after the events, as if the systematic and massive violence against the Jews of the Reich had left him speechless. The chronicling was soon resumed: the restrictions and humiliations that immediately followed the beginning of the war, the move to a “Jews’ house” in the spring of 1940, the wearing of the “Jewish Star” in September 1941, the first deportations to the East in October of that year. Throughout the ‘30s, Klemperer also commented on the major policy moves of the regime inside Germany and on the international scene and, after September 1939, the philologist became a military specialist, like almost everybody else. But even the most momentous events were always presented through the prism of Klemperer’s reflections and feelings or those of the people closest to him.

Once it became clear that the Gestapo would regularly be searching the “Jews’ house,” the diaries were hidden at a non-Jewish friend’s home. Actually, if the Gestapo had discovered any scrap of the current entries, Klemperer’s life, that of his wife and of the people whose critical opinions he recorded, would have immediately been at risk.

Klemperer himself was anything but a pleasant person, if one picks up clues from the 1933-1945 diaries, as well as from the prior diaries and the autobiography. He was cantankerous, resentful of colleagues more successful than himself, obsessive, a hypochondriac and, all in all, petty. As already mentioned, Klemperer was a German to the core, dismissive of his Jewish background for quite a long time and a staunch anti-Zionist. Thus, in June 1933: “We hear a lot about Palestine now, it does not appeal to us. Anyone who goes there exchanges nationalism and narrowness for nationalism and narrowness.” In 1933, for Klemperer, Nazism still looked like “nationalism and narrowness.” “Where do I belong?” he wrote soon after the proclamation of the Nuremberg Laws. “To the ‘Jewish nation,’ decrees Hitler. And I feel the Jewish nation recognized by Izakowitz [a Zionist acquaintance] is a comedy and am nothing but a German or German European.”

It could be, however, that a less obsessive person would not have been such a precise diarist, and a more generous one would probably have overlooked the foibles of all those who surrounded him, Jews and Germans alike. It is remarkable nonetheless that as sarcastic as Klemperer could be about his fellow Jews, his deep empathy with their individual suffering and their collective plight always comes to the fore in the end. And the diarist was as critical of himself as of others.

From Sept. 19, 1941, all Jews in Germany above age 6 had to wear the “Jewish Star”: “Today, the Jew’s star,” Klemperer wrote, “Frau Voss has already sewn it on, intends to turn her coat back over it. Allowed? I reproach myself with cowardice. Yesterday Eva wore out her feet on the pavements and must now go shopping in town and cook afterwards. Why? Because I am ashamed. Of what? From Monday I intend to go shopping again. By then we shall certainly have heard what effect it has.” Klemperer’s wife, Eva, not being Jewish, did not have to wear the star. Not a few “ordinary Germans” seem to have sympathized with the Jews, after the introduction of the star. On Sept. 20, Klemperer tells of Eva’s visit to Frau Kronheim: “The latter took the tram yesterday--front platform. The driver: Why was she not sitting in the car? Frau Kronheim is small, slight, stooped, her hair completely white. As a Jewess, she was forbidden to do so. The driver struck the panel with his fist. ‘What a mean thing!’ Poor comfort.” The most extraordinary expression of sympathy was recorded on Nov. 24, 1941: “Frau Reichenbach . . . told us a gentleman had greeted her in a shop doorway. Had he not mistaken her for someone else?--’No, I do not know you, but you will now be greeted frequently. We are a group “who greet the Jew’s star.” ’ “ Yet, exactly a month beforehand, on Oct. 25, Klemperer had written “I always ask myself: Who among the ‘Aryan’ Germans is really untouched by National Socialism? The contagion rages in all of them, perhaps it is not contagion, but basic German nature.”

The diary is full of such contradictions. For each illustration of German or Jewish attitudes there is, at some point, some contrary example. And this, precisely, makes the diary so trustworthy, while so many other so-called authentic chronicles were subsequently rephrased. Clearly there was no attempt on Klemperer’s part to prove anything or to let some set interpretation impose coherence upon an often incoherent reality. What the diary shows is that the attitudes of ordinary Germans toward the regime and toward the Jews were mixed, that these attitudes changed over time in one direction or the other (the policeman in Dolzschen who had always been friendly and supportive until 1938 suddenly “looked through” Klemperer, as if he did not know him, after the pogrom of Nov. 9 and 10, 1938). It also shows the fear of many Germans to express any open criticism of the relentless pace of persecution, then of an extermination that possibly a third of the population was aware of. Or was it sheer indifference that used fear as a pretext?

As for the Jews, we saw how Klemperer recorded their distress, their flimsy hopes, their total disarray. In mid-October 1941, the first deportations from the Reich to Minsk, Riga, Kovno and Lodz started. Many of the deported Jews where shot upon arrival. The shootings were not yet known in Dresden but despair was spreading. “The deportations to Poland continue,” Klemperer noted on Nov. 9. “I met the Neumanns. . . . These usually plucky, optimistic people were utterly downcast, considering suicide. . . . Frau Neumann’s uncle, a man in his late 60s committed suicide with his wife in Berlin, when they were to be deported.”

In fact, little did the Jews know of the fate that awaited them, as, at the end of 1941, mass murder of Jews on Soviet territory turned into the Final Solution for the whole of European Jewry. “My adhortatio [words of encouragement],” Klemperer wrote in the final line of the last entry for the year 1941. “Head held high for the difficult last five minutes!”