I Will Bear Witness, Volume 2: A Diary of the Nazi Years: 1942-1945

by Victor Klemperer

Book Overview

Destined to take its place alongside The Diary of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel's Night as one of the great classics of the Holocaust, I Will Bear Witness is a timeless work of literature, the most... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375756973
• ISBN13: 9780375756979
• Release Date: April 2001
• Publisher: Modern Library
• Length: 576 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.1" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Volume Two Continues This Valuable & Frightening Story

As with Volume One (see my review), the most disarming and appealing feature of this tome is its slow and ineluctable building of suspense and empathy as World War I veteran Klemperer steadily weaves the day to day details of his life in Nazi Germany in the 12 years of that regime into a portrait of a rogue state moving irresistably down the path to tyranny and terror. The reader is sucked into the vortex of what it is like to live under such circumstances, where an aging Jewish professor who has built a life of purpose and meaning based on scholarship, hard work, and the belief in the rationalism of the state begins to understand that it will all unravel around him. As the story continues here, the years of tyranny of National Socialism reach their climax, so that Klemperer, a Jew married to an Aryan woman, increasingly finds solace and relief from the growing insanity swirling around him by concentrating on his academic writing, which he continues against all odds. Even the most simple and basic freedoms are denied them, so his refusal to submit to the progressively more invective growth of lies, invectives, and accusations of the Nazi regime build into a quiet resolve to resist in the way he knows best, by maintaining an intelligent, insightful, and careful witness to the everyday horrors perpetrated with malice and cunning on the Jews as the scapegoat for all of Germany's post-WWI social and economic woes. One reads in horror as Victor and Eva continue to be persecuted and systematically stripped of everything of meaning to them; their house, car, telephone, typewriter, even their beloved cat. While he understands all too well the dangers for him and his family, he consistently resists the increasingly strident pleas from family members for him to emigrate primarily because he identifies himself first and foremost as a German, and he refuses to abandon the Fatherland to the beastial likes of Hitler and the Nazis. One's sense of horror is magnified by his careful attention to the day to day details of living in the regime, the difficulties in finding socks, or clothing, or a cobbler, or vegetables, coffee, tobacco (both he and Eva are smokers), dealing with increasingly restrictive curfews, the ordeal and shame associated with the enforced wearing of the yellow star of David, the progressive acts of enforced segregation from the general populace, the occasional experiences at degradation at the hands of a youthful crowd of Hitler Youth. Yet there is great humanity evidenced here, both within the Jewish community and without it. The pathos of ordinary people caught in the web of a totalitarian state is made quite clear; unlike other academics who recently have argued in belief of a generalized and universalized hate on the part of ordinary Germans leading to their willing complicity in the persecution of Jews, Klemperer offers almost daily testimony of the unending acts of kindness, generosity, and personal

If You Have Ears, Listen

Victor Klemperer is a spokesman. With characteristic German precision, he articulates the daily victimization and humiliation of the Jews by the Third Reich as it removes the privileges of citizenship one by one, from tram tickets to life itself. Each day becomes a surreal ritual of survival, finding food bereft of rations, hiding anything that might offend an uninvited Gestapo searching his home, speaking softly to discern the fate of those shipped to labor camps, trying to divine the future and to understand the past while utterly damning the present. Klemperer's testimony alone is worth our time, so that we may better understand how far we can stray from civilization.But then Victor Klemperer is also a hero. As I read his diaries, I began to realize the bravery of his writing and of those who hid the pages for him. Klemperer's opinions of the Third Reich are explicit. Exposure would have ended his life immediately. I kept wondering whether I could ever do that, say, if the mayor declared Italians to be the Master Race and blue-eyed blonds were systematically searched, deported and killed. Would I care so much for posterity, and for the future of humanity, that I would dare to write what is right no matter the consequence, to expose evil in the midst of it, and perhaps to die for it? Victor did. Reading his diary is to honor that heroism.But then Victor Klemperer is also a human being. He wrestles mightily with his German heritage, with his privileges by marriage to an Aryan, with his being alive while others disappeared. Through all the terror, he is still willing to seek out trust when mistrust is the word to live by. He is saddened by the devastating bombing of Dresden, not vengeful. When I expect his words to be filled with hatred, I am struck by their frequent ambivalence and even passion. Klemperer is a complex person, like most human beings, like you and me. This is a diary that confirms that, when ordinary people are put into extraordinary circumstances, they become extraordinary. As is this book.

Authenticity at last.

I devoured the roughly 1500 pages of Victor Klemperer's diary 1933-1945 in the German original in four consecutive days and nights. What grips one is the question how Klemperer, an identifiable Jew, could have survived the Third Reich in the face of the horrendous persecution of the Jews which his diary shows closing in on him from all sides, and still be alive at the end of the Second World War viz the second volume of the book.What saved him was favorable coincidents -- so many of them that they would appear improbable in a work of fiction. On some occasions, his marriage to a Christian wife, a concert pianist, worked in his favor; on others, the courage of friends of the family, like the dentist, who dared to hide Klemperer's completed diary pages in her home - despite the danger of Gestapo raids - to save them for posterity; at other points the leniency of an official helped (Klemperer's World-War-I-medal for bravery, or his renown as a Professor of Romance Philology tended to summon respect). In this second volume, it is shown how humiliations for Jews went from bad to worse as the War climaxed. Jews e.g. were no longer permitted to use a seat when they rode in a tram. On one occasion, when Klemperer was on a tram-platform (where he was permitted to stand), the tramdriver addressed him in a sympathetic fashion saying: "What a relief to see your yellow star. At last someone to talk to openly in this moronic madness of a War." By a near miracle, Klemperer and his wife survived the Dresden air raid in February 1945, and his wife pulled the yellow star off him; he then survived the remainder of the war by posturing as an "Aryan" who lost all his identification. My mother used to say: "No matter what I can tell you about the Third Reich, you won't be able to realize its real atmosphere. Life under that dictatorship is not transmittable by mere words." The sensation is that Klemperer's diaries do transmit that atmosphere, and in enormously precise words. The authenticity of the account arises from the peculiar perspective of a diarist, who, at any given point, possesses neither a privileged view of the future, nor easy hindsight-cleverness. An example is Klemperer's poignant account of the deportation of the Dresden Jews. Trembling he might be with the next transport, he was at pains to gather all available information, but with little success. The fate of the deported was strictly prohibited knowledge, and rumors were ineffectual in this era of universal mutual distrust. Klemperer surmises, no sooner than three years into the War, that they probably all get killed. Auschwitz especially, he suspects, must be a slaughterhouse. But only after the end of the war he learns that the number of victims runs to the millions, that some people were read out for immediate destruction at the trains' arrival ramps, that people were purposefully annihilated by forced labor and hunger, by medical exp

Read His Witness.

I feel I share a miniscule slice of Klemperer's heroism by reading every word of his (as translated) diaries. I wish his LTI was translated in English and widely(and affordably) available. If you consider human nature an important matter, or remember your sixth-grade introduction on "man's inhumanity to man" (excuse the gender mess there)and wonder why that was worth reading about, you must read this book. So many insightful philosophical, theological and sociological wrtings came from the WWII era because the essential truths of humanity's condition were laid bare for many of the observer-participants in the horrible conflict. Klemperer precisely and heroically relates what amounts to some of that exposed raw data, from a perspective that is tragically and wildly underrepresented--that of a German civilian Jew, alive and in Germany throughout the war, but in at least occasional contact with others: Jew, gentile and monstrosity.Depending on your understanding of God and God's intervention in human affairs, this book may have much more (and very complex)to say about God's place in Klemperer's life and Klemperer's in God's universe.Of the other comments, I find only one impression that strikes me as troubling. I think that neither Klemperer' personal, astounding ability to adapt to misery and maintain self-truth nor the occasional pleasant human interactions nor Nazi Germany's eventual military defeat nor the failure of the "final solution" to eliminate all of the Jews of Nazi-occupied territory signify an ultimate victory for good over evil, etc. If you imagine all the books that all those Klemperer describes being abused,lied to, humiliated, injured, herded, deloused, robbed and murdered(etc.) would write, and the sad and disgusting track record of humanity since...including the commonplace manipulations of language and atrocious applications of perverted science by so many subsequent evil rulers, there is precious little over which to organize a victory dance for humanity's use of language, technology or other human beings.I wish more people were buying it.

A terrible tragedy, but evil did not triumph

Klemperer's courage-and that of his wife and a tiny circle of confidants-and his almost superhuman endurance made possible the remarkable feat of keeping an almost daily diary during years of a starvation diet, Gestapo terror, persecution, exhausting physical labour, etc. Many media reviews refer to Klemperer's vivid description of the mechanics of Nazi persecution and criminality, which is indeed a compelling feature of the diaries, and an important testimony. But, more profoundly, Klemperer's diaries demonstrate that the Nazis emphatically failed in their attempt to dehumanise and destroy Klemperer. If anything, the somewhat unlikeable intellectual of the early diary is tempered into a figure of true greatness in the second volume--just as the persecution he endures reaches an almost fatal intensity.This is perhaps the key insight offered by Klemperer's diaries: they demonstrate that, while the Nazis did everything in their power to do so, they did not in fact rob Klemperer of his dignity, his inner dignity as a sensitive and ethical human being. Our century has tended to see victims of evil as largely passive and pathetic. We have forgotten that it is possible to die nobly. Klemperer's diaries remind us that the Jews, massacred by the millions, were not necessarily deprived of their humanity and dignity even as they were put to death. Photographs cannot testify to this, in fact they tend to convey the opposite impression. It is only the whispering of the soul on its way to meet its Maker which could testify to this. Klemperer's diaries are something similar.Some readers will take offense at a small fraction of Klemperer's opinions, chiefly his hostility to Zionism, which he saw as basically another race-based idealogy. This disagreement should not be allowed to become an obstacle to an understanding of the clear meaning of his diaries.Klemperer's diaries are magnificent and should be widely read, not just because of their vivid and detailed account of life during the Nazi years, but because they are proof that the bestial violence of the Nazis could not and did not deprive the Nazi's victims of their humanity; many millions died and are unable to affirm this; Klemperer lived and testifies to this truth on behalf of them all.