I Will Bear Witness 1933-1941: A Diary of the Nazi Years (Modern Library) (Living Language Series): A Diary of the Nazi Years: 1933-1941

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The database covers the entire four-decade period (from 1918 to 1959) in which Klemperer kept his diaries. The diary genre has specific qualities that distinguish it from all other literary forms. It is the most honest genre, especially if the diarist had no intention to disclose his thoughts and feelings to the public. The reader of a diary always appraises the intimacy and spontaneity of the writer, and joins a journey in which both author and reader do not know how it would end. Walser's speech caused a stir. The philosopher Jurgen Habermas, visibly angry, walked out of the assembly hall. A few days later Habermas protested in the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper against Walser's attempt to whitewash the tragic dimension The name of Klemperer has long been synonymous with music. One of the greatest conductors of all time, Otto Klemperer was among those titanic figures of the Jewish diaspora of the 1930’s who fructified the Anglo-American cultural landscape. His exile was our good fortune. entjuden ("to de-Jew"). Conversely, after the war, a strong trend of Entnazifizierung (" denazification") took place.

In addition to an edited transcript, the database provides a facsimile of each handwritten diary entry. An intuitive tab structure allows for easy navigation between the transcript and the handwritten originals. continue to feel for the Nazis' crimes. ''I Will Bear Witness'' is an intensely German document; with Martin Chalmers's fluent, trustworthy translation, delicate abridgment and informative notes, English-speaking experience; the whole, hard to put down, is a true murder mystery -- from the perspective of the victim. March 17, 1933 . . . on Friday, unfortunately, Thiemes was here. It was frightful . . . such enthusiastic conviction and support. The phraseology of unity. Progress piously repeated. Grete (his wife) said, "Everything else failed, now we have to In 2003, Stan Neumann directed a documentary based on Klemperer's diaries, La langue ne ment pas ( Language does not lie), which considers the importance of Klemperer's observations and the role of the witness in extreme situations.He resented his professional marginalization deeply, rightly suspecting that anti-Semitism was partly to blame for his failure to advance. Yet his belief in the superiority of German culture remained undiminished; he envied rival scholars like Erich Auerbach, who with Vossler’s help had escaped persecution by finding a niche in Istanbul. Until 1933, and even for some time afterward, Klemperer still identified unconditionally with the German nation, and had nothing but contempt for Jews who disowned Germany, going so far in his diary (in a 1934 entry) to compare Zionists, with “their nosing after blood, their ancient ‘cultural roots,’” to Nazis. claim he or she "did not know." If Klemperer, in his isolation, knew, most Germans must have known, too. The young Klemperer had sought to make a career first as a writer and then as a journalist, in neither case with much success. In the years before World War I, having married the highly musical and non-Jewish Eva Schlemmer, he decided to start again, and threw himself into academic studies under the guidance of the leading Romance scholar Karl Vossler. Like many patriotic German Jews, Klemperer, already then in his thirties, volunteered for and fought in the Great War. But despite his record of service, and despite the several excellent books on French literature he would publish in the ensuing decades, he never rose higher than a chair at the Technical Academy in Dresden, a second-class post for a first-class mind. prelude.'' The day before that election, rigged by the Nazis with giant propaganda and intimidation, Klemperer had heard Hitler speak and wondered at his delivery: ''But the tone! The unctuous bawling, truly bawling, most evocative, most observant record of daily life in the Third Reich, not solely from the vantage point of a victim.

Omer Bartov. 2003. Germany's War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories. Cornell University Press. p. 201 When a neighbor remarks that Klemperer, in his isolation, would hardly be able to cover in his diary the "main events" like the war, he writes: "The main events aren't as important for my record as is the every-day of the tyranny, The early diaries from the Weimar Republic offer an insight into Klemperer’s life and career as a professor of Romance languages at the Technische Universität Dresden (TUD). As the Nazis rose to power, he adopted the role of a “cultural historian of the catastrophe,” documenting the ongoing withdrawal of rights from Jews. These observations are accompanied by a minute account of his day-to-day life under National Socialism. His post-1945 diaries testify to a desire for a radical new beginning – both for himself and for Germany. Though less well known than his other diaries and until now never published in full, these provide significant insights into the divided post-war Germany and early East Germany, as well as Klemperer’s engagement with Communism and Zionism.were to save Klemperer's life: his wife's ''racial purity'' exempted her husband from deportation to the east and almost certain death until early 1945, and amid the destruction and the chaos in Dresden, Eva But let's return to Klemperer's diary. It reminded me, once again, about the same old truth that people often fall under the yoke of manmade organizations and socio-political structures. In Klemperer's case, that was the Nazi state that was an oppressor and killer. The Nazi party was a soulless organization, using on the one hand rationalistic mechanisms of bureaucracy and government, and following on the other hand, an insane, totally detached from the reality ideology. (In Solzhenitsyn, the monster was the Soviet Russia and the Communist party.)