I WILL BEAR WITNESS: A DIARY OF THE NAZI YEARS (Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten: Tagebücher 1933-1941)

Diary by Victor Klemperer, 1995

The title is Victor Klemperer's own formulation. On 27 May 1942 he wrote in his diary, "I will bear witness, precise witness." That is what he had been doing since 1933 and what he proceeded to do during the last years of the Third Reich, at great personal risk. Indeed, Klemperer's secret diaries represent one of the most evocative accounts we have of the Nazi years in Germany.

There are a number of reasons for their effectiveness. Klemperer's training in textual analysis figures prominently among them. From 1920 until 1935, when he fell victim to the Nazi policy of coordinating German culture (Gleichschaltung ), Klemperer worked as professor of Romance languages at the Technical University in Dresden. And the diaries abound with trenchant readings of Nazi propaganda and its impact on the speech and thought of everyday Germans. Many of the readings, in fact, appear in Klemperer's highly regarded monograph about Nazi discourse, LTI: Lingua tertii Imperii (1947). Because in his diaries Klemperer scrutinizes communist as well Nazi ideology, they did not find a publisher in East Germany, his home after the war until his death in 1960. Not until 1995 were they published, in abridged form, in the original German (Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten ). In 1998 they were published in English translation.

Klemperer's status as an academic shaped his diaries in other ways as well. In their first parts he discusses at length the reactions of both students and fellow professors to Nazism. He has much more sympathy for the former group, whose attitudes he depicts as often ambivalent and conflicted. For example, in 1936 Klemperer wrote about his colleagues, "If one day the situation were reversed and the fate of the vanquished lay in my hands, then I would let all the ordinary folk go, and even some of the leaders, who might perhaps after all have had honorable intentions and not known what they were doing. But I would have all the intellectuals strung up and the professors three feet higher than all the rest; they would be left hanging from the lampposts for as long as was compatible with hygiene."

This sense of betrayal pervades the diaries. Like many assimilated German Jews, Klemperer greatly valued the humanistic tradition in German culture. It was the center of German identity, according to him. And for all Klemperer's insight he maintained a kind of willful blindness during the first years of the Nazi regime, insisting that the Nazis were fundamentally un-German and that they would be supplanted by recrudescence of true Germanness. Eventually he came to realize, with great acrimony, that many quondam purveyors of humanistic values had definitively abandoned their cause. But Klemperer's quixotic ideas about German identity, and his perception of himself as a German, lingered, fatefully keeping him in Germany until it was too late to get out. Money and lack of connections played a role here too, as did the fragile health of his non-Jewish wife. (Klemperer's marriage enabled him to avoid deportation.) Yet above all Klemperer stayed because he believed that no other culture could sustain him and his intellectual passions. As this culture quite literally collapsed around him, and with neither an academic position nor publishing prospects, he continued to write about French and Italian literature, noting his progress and frustrations in his diaries. From Klemperer's wry and also moving comments on having to give up his car and his typewriter to his vivid portrait of the Dresden bombings, I Will Bear Witness contains a wealth of information about quotidian experiences in the Third Reich and their psychological toll. The life it records is, however, that of a scholar.

Klemperer does not only inveigh against the treachery of fellow intellectuals. In some of the diaries' most disquieting passages he condemns the reemergence of a ghetto mentality among assimilated Jews whose response to Hitler differed from his. For Klemperer giving up on the German cultural mission of Dichten und Denken engendered parochialism or, again, a ghetto mentality. This is how he sees Zionism, for example. And Klemperer attaches the same term to the mind-set of Jews who tried to survive financially by propitiating the Nazi regime. Jewish behavior in the Third Reich, he goes so far as to suggest, is enough to make one into an anti-Semite.

Such thoughts testify to more than the complexity of German-Jewish attitudes in the mid-1930s. Klemperer knows that his feelings are ugly. That he expresses them nonetheless is an indication of his candor, of the compelling authenticity of the diaries. Furthermore, Klemperer dissects his own response to Nazism and the difficulties it brought with the same ruthlessness he brings to bear on everything else he addresses. The paradoxical effect is that the diaries have their greatest force where Klemperer dwells on his own weaknesses. Here we have the impression of utter self-honesty under the most difficult circumstances, circumstances that must have made the refuge of delusion very attractive.

—Paul Reitter