A German Jew’s Soviet ending

The diaries of Victor Klemperer from the Nazi period were a phenomenon when published a decade ago. A German Jew married to a non-Jew, Klemperer kept from 1933 to 1945 a scrupulous record of hardship and persecution, which astonishingly he survived. His writing was not stylish -- this pedantic, self-doubting professor of 18th century French literature took pride in avoiding literary effects. Nor had he Berlin gossip to share, shut away as he was in provincial Dresden. What he had were powers of observation, human integrity and a rage to get it down, to bear witness. With a minimum of self-pity, he conveyed the enormity of what was happening through its unrelenting everydayness. He used the close shot to give us the big picture. Klemperer was simply one of the century’s great diarists.

So it is strange, though perhaps not surprising, that his postwar diaries have met with less acclaim. They too are an extraordinary and indispensable record, but of a different, more complex kind. “The Lesser Evil” brings us Klemperer’s final years as a Communist in East Germany. His gifts as a diarist and his prickly shrewdness remain. But we are no longer following a morally straightforward story of resilient, uncompromised victimhood; the focus now is on the murkier terrain of Cold War Germany, and on complications within Klemperer himself.

He could have left. He could have followed his few surviving friends to the West or to Palestine. The Berlin Wall did not go up until 1961, the year after his death. Instead he chose to stay, a “German to the last,” as he calls himself. Without believing the Soviet catechism, he joined the KPD (the German Communist Party), won back the teaching post from which the Nazis had fired him and rose to become a notable of sorts in the Stalinized apparatus of East German culture. At this distance it makes little sense. But neither did Klemperer’s shattered world.

Readers of the previous diaries, “I Shall Bear Witness: 1933-41” and “To the Bitter End: 1942-45,” will have left Klemperer and his wife, Eva, as they return on foot in June 1945 to their beloved house in a small township on the edge of Dresden, now in ruins from Allied bombs and under Soviet control. “The Lesser Evil” opens, after a week’s pause, with the Klemperers reinstalled. (His editors, not Klemperer, broke his life into volumes.) The grocer whom the Nazi mayor made a compulsory tenant after forcing them to live in communal Jewish housing has fled. The manuscript of Klemperer’s diaries, hidden by a friend, proves to be safe. But the “all-too-beautiful fairy tale” lasts less than a month. Food is short. Soon trees disappear from parks for fuel. Everyone jostles for favors from the Soviet occupiers. To his disgust, Klemperer is visited by ex-Nazis who beg him, as an accredited victim of fascism, to attest to their good behavior.

As hope returns with nothing yet to show for it, home life passes in Beckett-like bleakness. Klemperer, now in his mid-60s, has a bad heart. Eva is depressive, ill and near collapse. She has no shoes, and for a concert at the Staatskapelle must borrow a neighbor’s. Their cat is blind. Eager for a full professorship, Klemperer makes a calamitous move to the University of Greifswald, by the Baltic Sea, lured by the promise of a car and a house, which turns out to be an unheated slum. Guiltily, he sums up the year 1947: Before, Nazis were to blame for his wife’s misery; now it’s his fault.

Professionally, the news is less grim. Back in Dresden he lectures, writes, administers. Students adore him. Honors, posts and professorships pile up. He even gains a seat in the Volkskammer, East Germany’s toothless parliament. His path-breaking study of Nazi corruptions of language, “LTI” ( for Lingua Tertii Imperii), published by Aufbau in 1947, wins him some fame. (Published in English as “The Language of the Third Reich” by Athlone in 2000, it is surprisingly topical: Nearly all its complaints can today be leveled at political and corporate spin.)

Not that achievement fortifies Klemperer’s fragile ego. Whenever he is at risk of feeling pleased with himself, his perfectionism pulls him up. “You are a war profiteer, you owe your success solely to the emptiness of the Eastern zone,” he writes. The youngest of four brothers, he was used to living in their shadows; two died before Hitler came to power, but Georg, a prominent neurologist who treated Lenin, left for America in 1935 and lived to preside over a clan of successful progeny. Victor’s cousin, the renowned conductor Otto Klemperer, also prompts envious reflection on his own mediocrity. Were Victor not as strict in judging others, self-punishment of this kind could grow wearing; as it is, the Rodney Dangerfield side of his character works as comic relief.

When Eva dies, in July 1951, Klemperer is both bereft and liberated: Caring for her had become a full-time job. His entry that night is characteristically honest and heartfelt. He recognizes that even before sharing his fate as a Jew, she had sacrificed her career as a musician to her marriage. He is nonetheless soon in love with a 25-year-old graduate student, Hadwig Kirchner, and in May 1952 marries her. She looks after him to the end and brings him moments of happiness. A devout Catholic and a socialist, she also scolds him for belonging to a party that has betrayed its egalitarian ideals. But for us to judge Klemperer’s politics would be arrogant and idle. An innocent everyman, he sees politics from the outside, as beyond understanding or control, like the sea or the weather. The hard men in the Soviet Military Administration treat him as a useful fool. At a party meeting, a young cadre patronizes him: “You should be very nice to the professor, his brother was Lenin’s doctor.”

Nowhere does Klemperer resolve his discordant loyalties -- German, Jew, Communist, left-wing democrat and latter-day disciple of Enlightenment reason -- by sacrificing one to the others. He laments the predicament, but you cannot imagine him free of it.

He believes, not absurdly, that Germany’s western zones teem with ex-Nazis. So, he soon realizes, does the Soviet zone. He worries that his fellow citizens will take revenge for defeat on Germany’s few surviving Jews. The presence of Soviet tanks reassures him, until Stalin’s anti-Semitism opens his eyes. In 1949, after Stalin abandons any pretense of seeking a unified, neutral Germany, two hostile states, East and West Germany, are born. East German Communists set out to “build socialism” and suppress dissent. Klemperer despises the perversion of critical thought, yet takes refuge in the conviction that it is “1000x worse” in the West. He has chosen, he tells himself, “the lesser evil.”

He wonders derisively why his university’s literature department needs 35 professors of Marxism and likens a Stalin Language Conference he attends to Talmud school: “dogma and dogma interpretation.” Despite all that has happened, his hostility to Zionism is unshakeable. Of its founder he writes, in “LTI,” that “Hitler and [Theodor] Herzl feed to a very large extent on the same heritage.” The allusion is to German romantic idealism, with its emphasis on group sentiment and nationhood. To a child of the Enlightenment -- the son of an assimilated rabbi who raised his family with the values of the liberal bourgeoisie -- the idea of a state founded on faith or ancestry made no sense. Yet -- how could he? -- Klemperer never denied his Jewishness, unless it was thrust at him by others to cast him in a role or provoke sought-for responses. A visit to Auschwitz in 1952 as a member of the Assn. of Victims of the Nazi Regime speaks loudly here. Of his feelings he writes: “Bored

Klemperer was not a saintly or heroic man. In the early 1960s, braver, more clear-headed Communist intellectuals, like chemist Robert Havemann, East Germany’s Andrei Sakharov, turned openly against the regime. Havemann’s house arrest inspired a later generation of protesters from the churches and the peace movement, who contributed greatly to East Germany’s eventual downfall. Klemperer’s own disbelief never matured into dissent. Yet without fence-sitters like him -- a sort of silent majority within the party elite -- Communist despotism could never have died peacefully in its bed. The moral contrast with Nazi tyranny, which had to be fought to the steps of the Reichstag and the ruins of Dresden’s Frauenkirche, is suggestive, though not one Klemperer dwells on. Reflecting and drawing conclusions were not his thing. “Every day, to work on obstinately, not to think”: a good watchword for a diarist of Klemperer’s caliber. Thinking might have got in the way.

“The Lesser Evil” represents what Hollywood used to call a Russian ending -- melancholy, ambiguous, haunted by failure. The black and white of the Nazi diaries has shaded to gray. Yet it is never depressing, and often funny. It will disappoint only those expecting another Anne Frank or Doctor Zhivago. Nearly every page gains vitality from Klemperer’s dogged refusal to simplify. Translator Martin Chalmers has cut, at rough guess, about two-fifths of the material in the German edition, itself a pruning of more than 5,000 typescript pages. He provides excellent notes and maintains the high standard he set in translating the earlier diaries. Taken as a chronicle of modern Germany or as a testament to living in uncertainty, “The Lesser Evil” is a remarkable coda to an extraordinary life. *