Victor Klemperer
From Freepedia
Victor Klemperer (Landsberg (Prussia) 1881-1960), decorated veteran of World War I, businessman, journalist and eventually a Professor of Literature, specialising in the French Enlightenment at the Dresden University of Technology. He was the son of a rabbi, cousin to the famous conductor Otto Klemperer and brother to the surgeon Georg Klemperer, who was a personal physician to Lenin.
A converted Protestant of Jewish descent, Klemperer's life started to worsen considerably after the Nazi rise to power in 1933. Klemperer had long kept a diary, but from 1933 through the end of the war his work provides a unique day-to-day account of life under tyranny and the struggle for survival among Jews in totalitarian Germany. His diary also details the Nazi's perversion of the German language for propaganda purposes, which Klemperer would use as the basis for his book LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii.
From 1935, under the Nuremberg Laws of Citizenship and Race, Klemperer was stripped of his academic title, job, citizenship and freedom and eventually forced to work in a factory and as a day laborer. Since his wife was "Aryan", Klemperer dodged deportation for most of the war, but was rehoused under miserable conditions in a ghetto (Judenhaus), where he was routinely questioned, mistreated and humiliated by the Gestapo.
Due to be deported on February 14th, 1945, he used the confusion created by Allied bombings that night to remove his yellow star, join a refugee column, and escape into American-controlled territory. He and his wife survived and Klemperer's diary narrates their return (largely on foot through Bavaria and Eastern Germany) to their house on the outskirts of Dresden. They managed to reclaim the house, which had been "aryanised" under the Nazis, in Dresden-Dolzschen.
Klemperer went on to become a significant post-war cultural figure in East Germany, teaching at the universities of Greifswald, Berlin and Halle. He became a delegate of the Cultural Union in the GDR Parliament ("Volkskammer") in 1950.
Klemperer's diary was published in 1995 as Tagebücher (Berlin, Aufbau). It was an immediate literary sensation and rapidly became a bestseller in Germany. The English translation appeared in two volumes: I Shall Bear Witness (1933 to 1941) and To The Bitter End (1942 to 1945). An additional volume, The Lesser Evil, covering the years 1945-1959, has also been published in English.
External links
- The everyday life of tyranny
- Ms Susie Ehrmann. The Diaries of Victor Klemperer
- "Surviving the Firestorm" (Excerpt from Klemperer's diary describing the bombing of Dresden)
- Large sequence of excerpts from Klemperer's diaries
