The Chosen

As a young man, Victor Klemperer began to keep a record of his daily life and experiences, and this soon became so much of a habit that he would have been lost without it. He did not differ significantly from other dedicated diarists, whose labors bring personal satisfaction but rarely attract wider attention. What made Klemperer different was the fact that he was a German Jew who lived in Germany from the origins of the Hitler regime until its catastrophic end, and his diary, written in perilous circumstances and smuggled by Eva, his wife, in installments to a secure hiding place in a friend’s home, became not only a personal journal but, in his own words, “a record of the everyday life of tyranny.” Indeed, when it was published in Germany in 1995, it was recognized immediately as the most comprehensive and detailed account of the Jewish experience during the Third Reich that existed; in the words of an English journalist, it is “a color film of Nazi Germany after years of black and white.”

The first volume of Martin Chalmers’ English translation of the diary appeared in 1998. In it, Klemperer, who in 1933 was a professor of French literature at Dresden Technical University, wrote about how he was protected from the first wave of Nazi atrocities against the Jews because of his service in the Bavarian artillery in Flanders in 1915 and 1916 and because he was married to a Protestant. His situation deteriorated, however, after 1935, when he was forced to retire from the university with a resultant serious reduction in income, and his scholarly work effectively ended after 1938, when the Nazis denied the Jews the use of all university and public libraries. Henceforth, he concentrated on three projects: writing the history of his own life from 1881 to 1918; compiling the materials for a philological analysis of the language of National Socialism, which was published in 1947 under the title “LTI: Lingua tertii Imperii”; and keeping a meticulous account in his diary of his daily life.

But even this work became increasingly difficult, and not only because of the danger involved. Klemperer and his wife were forced by economic stringency and Nazi pressure to give up the home he had built in Dolzschen, on the outskirts of Dresden, and to move into what was called a Jews’ House, in which Jews with Christian spouses lived. In this new setting, he lost the privacy essential to study and literary composition, and at the same time, felt his world become more burdensome as a result of the special decrees against the Jews that the Nazis issued, particularly after the beginning of the war in 1939. The most humiliating of these for Klemperer was the order that, beginning on Sept. 19, 1941, all Jews must bear arm bands with the Star of David, which led him to write in his diary: “I . . . feel shattered, cannot composemyself. Eva . . . wants to take over all the errands from me. I only want to leave the house for a few minutes when it’s dark.”

The other decrees--set down in his diary on June 2, 1942--were no less inhumane, designed to deprive Jews of rights that other citizens enjoyed (the use of public transportation, for example, or access to parks and designated streets, going to a barber, owning a radio, using a telephone, buying tobacco or flowers or periodicals or visiting a museum) and to make them into nonpersons.

The main theme of the second volume of “I Will Bear Witness” is the elaboration and acceleration of this campaign of persecution. Klemperer makes it clear that even those Jews who had a relatively privileged existence, like those who lived in the Jews’ Houses, led a life of “fantastic hideousness”: “[F]ear of every ring at the door, of ill-treatment, insults, fear of one’s life, of hunger (real hunger), ever new bans, ever more cruel enslavement, deadly danger coming closer every day, every day new victims all around us, absolute helplessness.”

Even the scant hours of pleasure afforded by reading or work were interrupted by speculation about what was happening to the general Jewish population. The Gestapo arrested individuals on the slightest pretext and hustled them away to an unknown fate. There were dreadful rumors of mass suicides to avoid evacuation to the east and imprisonment in camps. In March 1942, Klemperer wrote: “In the last few days I have heard Auschwitz (or something like it), near Konigshutte in Upper Silesia, mentioned as the most dreadful concentration camp. Work in a mine, death within a few days. . . . Buchenwald, near Weimar, is said to be not necessarily and immediately fatal, but ‘worse than a prison. Twelve hours work (a day) under the SS.’ ” The idea had not yet dawned that there were camps in which work was only incidental and which existed exclusively for the extermination of Jews by gassing. It was clear enough, however, that of those who were evacuated, no one ever returned. All of which added a note of terror to the persistent rumor that the government intended to end the privileges accorded to mixed marriages like the Klemperers’ and to deport the Jewish partners to camps in Poland.

The extent to which Nazi feeling about the Jews was shared by the rest of the population was a constant topic of discussion among Klemperer’s acquaintances. The view that anti-Semitism was inborn and ineradicable in all Germans was often asserted but always contested in these discussions. Some argued that, on the basis of their own experience, Germans with university education were more apt to be anti-Semitic than members of the working class; others insisted that, regardless of class, there was a sympathy for the Jews that was impervious to anti-Semitic propaganda. Klemperer’s own feelings were ambivalent. On the street he had experienced gestures of goodwill from non-Jews but also had been the target of abuse and contumely. He did not regard himself as a Jew in any case. He was a strong supporter of the long tradition of Jewish assimilation and had grown up proud of his German-ness, believing, as he writes in one entry, “We, we Germans, are the truly chosen people.” This feeling was not fundamentally shaken by the atrocities of the Nazis. Klemperer also wrote during the war: “I am German and am waiting for the Germans to come back; they have gone to ground somewhere.”

Opinions about the fortunes of Germany in the war were as varied as views about the prevalence of anti-Semitism. Klemperer’s description of the shifting public mood, the proliferation of rumors and popular misconceptions about the international situation is one of the most fascinating aspects of his diaries. He also provides an intriguing analysis of Goebbels’ skill in using language to transform defeats into victories and to hide the approaching cataclysm from the German people. Klemperer believes that this verbal facility was a wasting asset and that as the general situation deteriorated, more and more Germans became aware of the contradictions and barefaced falsehoods in the daily war bulletins. He does not deny, however, that Goebbels was successful in persuading his audience of the infinite resourcefulness of the Fuhrer, and he records conversations with people who as late as the spring of 1945, when the Red Army was on the Oder with nothing between it and Berlin, were confident that Hitler was still capable of reversing the situation and winning the war.

Meanwhile, Klemperer’s own world was turning upside down. On Feb. 13, 1945, families in the Jews’ Houses were informed that all Jews capable of physical labor were required to report three days later to designated stations in working clothes, with a handbag that could be carried a long distance and with food for three days. There was no mistaking the meaning of this: It marked the end of Dresden’s Jews, regardless of their marriage status. A reprieve, however, followed hard on the sentence. Dresden had so far been spared from damage in the Allied bombing offensive (according to popular rumor because Winston Churchill’s aunt lived there) but on the night of the 13th, its luck ran out, and it was destroyed by British bombers. In the resultant chaos, Klemperer tore the hated yellow star from his jacket and fled with his wife toward the advancing American forces in Bavaria.

Not the least interesting part of this powerful and disturbing book is the entries describing his journey through a disintegrating Germany that was slipping rapidly from any central control, was subjected to uncontested raids by low-flying Allied planes and was crowded with refugees and German soldiers who were detached from their units. After speaking with some of these soldiers, Klemperer writes: “The men are resigned--it’s not war anymore, only slaughter, the Russians’ overwhelming numbers could no longer be stopped, etc. etc.--but that’s just it, they are only resigned and weary--one of them has been a soldier for seven and a half years--and by no means defeatist or even rebellious. They will undoubtedly go on letting themselves be slaughtered, they will undoubtedly go on offering resistance.”

Nor was their loyalty to Hitler fundamentally shaken. A one-armed SS officer told Klemperer that “the Fuhrer didn’t deserve to be defeated, he had had such good intentions and organized everything so well. And he would not be defeated either. The defeats so far had been the result of treachery. . . . Now, on the Fuhrer’s birthday, on April 20, our new offensive would begin and liberate the East.”

It was different, of course, for the civilian population. The war had visited upon them a tremendous destructive force, and they eagerly wanted it to end. The phrase that Klemperer heard most frequently during his flight from Dresden was, “If only the Americans would come.” Eventually they did come and restored the order that the Germans yearned for, even though it came to them from the hands of their conquerors.

Reading Klemperer’s diaries is a harrowing, but addictive, experience. The diaries’ authenticity is so obvious, their calm and often reflective tone so persuasive, that even their boring stretches--and these are inevitable in an account of a life as dull as it was dangerous--cannot cause the serious reader’s interest to flag. There is nothing quite like it in the historic literature on the Nazi period. *