I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years

Christian Century, Feb 7, 2001 by John P. Burgess

I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years. By Victor Klemperer. Random House, Volume I, 519 pp., $29.95; paperback, $14.95; Volume II, 556 pp., $29.95.

IN 1995, THE DIARIES that Victor Klemperer kept during the Third Reich were published in Germany and quickly sold more than 150,000 copies. Now available in English, they are a remarkable testimony to the life of a German Jew. As fascism and communism in Europe fade into the shadows of history, such personal documents, along with key works of literature, may be the best vehicles for helping us remember--and younger generations learn--what everyday life felt like in those times and places.

The son of a Jewish rabbi who moved to Berlin to serve the Reform Congregation, Klemperer himself confessed no religious faith as an adult. He thought of himself more as a German than as a Jew. He neither attended synagogue nor kept kosher. He married an "Aryan" and was formally registered as a Christian, but had no contact with the church. Klemperer Was an intellectual, an academic, whose specialization was Romantic literature. If he believed in anything bigger than himself, it was in the values of the French Enlightenment and its watchwords of liberty, equality and fraternity.

When Hitler was appointed chancellor in January 1933, Klemperer's world began to unravel. Now he was a Jew whether he liked it or not. Disoriented by this turn of events, he no longer took pride in his German identity, but felt as though he had no other. He increasingly found one purpose, one activity that kept him spiritually alive: his love of words and their power. He had kept diaries all of his life. Now they became more than random notes about his research interests or introspective analyses of his psyche. He began a painstaking exercise in analyzing the Nazi corruption of words, and in observing how it began to infect the language of ordinary Germans. Carefully and precisely, he described the changing fabric and texture of everyday life.

Klemperer declared that he would become a witness--not to the headline events that would later interest historians, but to the mundane and trivial details of life that Nazi ideology slowly but inexorably reshaped. He declared, moreover, that he would bear witness up to the end (part of the original German title that the American publishers have unfortunately dropped). So long as there was war, and so long as he was alive, he would look, listen and write.

From the first, Klemperer was aware that Hitler represented a threat to Jews. Within clays of Hitler's appointment, Nazi supporters flexed their muscles at the Technical University in Dresden, where Klemperer taught. He was soon excluded from faculty meetings. Fewer and fewer students enrolled in his classes.

At first, he saw these changing circumstances as an opportunity to devote his time and energy more fully to his research in French literature. But personal concerns continually diverted him. His wife's mental health was fragile. Often she was confined to bed. Her great hope--and increasingly his great hope for her--was to move out of the city. They completed arrangements for construction of a house on a piece of property that they had acquired on the outskirts of the city, planted a garden, and retreated from the storms of' belligerence that were brewing over Germany.

Caring for his wife entailed the everyday tasks of buying groceries, preparing meals, and reading aloud to her until she was able to fall asleep late at night. In whatever time remained, Klemperer continued his philological research and worked on his diaries. But he had his own health concerns. Physical exertion left him tired and out of breath. He worried that his heart was weak. He had urinary problems and for a time had to be catheterized regularly. Even in the midst of these troubles, Klemperer reports moments of childlike delight. His descriptions of buying and driving his first ear recall a world in which the automobile represented sheer adventure, and provide relief from the sense of impending political doom.

But the security of one's own house and the freedom of one's own ear were nothing more than brief illusions. In 1935, Klemperer was fired from the Technical University. Though he had been granted a small pension, money became a continual concern. He resorted to borrowing from friends and family, but Nazi laws restricted how much he could receive each month. He considered fleeing the country but was unable to attain a visa--and was uncertain that he wanted to leave.

Day by day, month by month, year by year, Klemperer records how the Nazi noose tightened around his neck. Jews could no longer drive. Jews could no longer ride public buses without a special permit. Jews could walk only on designated streets. Klemperer had to wear a Star of David on his coat whenever he left the house. He and other Jews were subject to unannounced house searches by the Gestapo, sometimes accompanied by threatening words and even beatings. Local authorities demanded that he make alterations to his house. Soon they informed him that he wound have to move out and rent it to an Aryan. Later he was told that he would have to sell it at a discount. The Klemperers were moved back into the city, into apartment houses reserved for Jews.