Foreboding Parallelisms of Today? Victor Klemperer's I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years (1933 - 1941)

Written in two volumes in English, Victor Klemperer’s I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years (1933 - 1941) captures the slow yet terrifying descent into Nazi dictatorship in Germany from 1933 through 1941. (The work was first published in Germany under the title Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten: Tagebücher 1933 - 1945 in 1995.)

Klemperer (1881 - 1960) was a German scholar whose father, Wilhelm Klemperer, had been a rabbi. Klemperer married a non-Jewish woman, a musician and musicologist, named Eva Maria Schlemmer in 1906 — she plays a major role in his diaries, with her insightful thoughts mentioned in nearly every entry he makes. Klemperer also became a Protestant in 1912, as he was not particularly religious but found Protestantism more fitting to his identity. This identification, however, did not matter to the Nazis, as being Jewish was a racial category for them, so Klemperer was a Jew in their eyes. (Klemperer was considered a Mischling, a pejorative term that meant one was a non-Aryan and Aryan “mix.”)

Like many men of his age, Klemperer enlisted in World War I and was also a professor at the University of Naples (1914-1915) in his early years prior to the outbreak of the war. (Additionally, his dissertation was on Montesquieu, which he completed in 1913.) After the war ended, he eventually wound up teaching at the Technical University at Dresden from 1920 until 1935 as a professor of Romance Languages, until he lost his post as a result of the Nazi’s rise to power. (It should be noted that the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service — Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums — was passed in 1933, which outlawed Jews from teaching at universities; Klemperer managed to hang on to his post until 1935 since he was a veteran of World War I.) Once he was forced into retirement, his salary was cut in half — that was his retirement pay.

Things quickly deteriorated after Klemperer’s retirement, making finances difficult for him and his wife, especially since they were building a home in Dölzschen, a small village outside of Dresden. Concurrently, Klemperer’s preoccupation with the ramping up of anti-Semitism begins to flood his thoughts and the pages of his diaries. On 23 March 1935, he writes, “Hitler’s regime is more stable than ever. […] In every aspect of the destruction of culture, Jew-baiting, internal tyranny, Hitler rules with ever worse creatures. Rust, the Reich Minister of Education, gave another speech today attacking ‘insipid intellectualism’”(116).

During this period, Klemperer begins taking driving lessons, gains a license, and buys a car. The car provides freedom for him and his wife, allowing them to pay visits to their friends across Germany. The conversations, however, when they have friends over or visit with them at their homes, are the same: tense, hopeless, depressing, gripped with fear and uncertainty. Numerous friends are also preparing to flee; many of them do, finding academic job posts in Peru, England, and elsewhere. In addition, for those not leaving, many do not wish to face what’s unfolding in Germany. He writes, “At the Jelskis a tense atmosphere as always. He does not want to hear about politics.” (197) In another instance, Klemperer too speaks of how he has stopped reading the news entirely, which is understandable considering how the Nazis assumed power over the press. (Klemperer’s early entries have eerie parallels to the sentiment being expressed by many today in the U.S. Numerous Americans are burying their heads in the sand, refusing to acknowledge our own descent into fascism, and even insisting “things aren’t that bad.”)

With each passing day, Klemperer’s freedoms as a Jew are further restricted. One of the worst blows is the loss of his freedom to drive. He writes sarcastically and mournfully:

The healthy sense of justice for every German manifested itself yesterday in a decree from Police Minister Himmler with immediate effect: withdrawal of driving license from all Jews. Justification: Because of the Grünspan¹ murder Jews are unreliable, are therefore not allowed to sit at the wheel, also their being permitted to drive offends the German traffic community, especially as they have presumptuously made use of the Reich highways built by the German workers’ hands. This prohibition hits us terribly hard. It is now three years exactly since I learned to drive, my driving license is dated 1/26/36 (279).

Klemperer spent a great deal of time describing his experience as a driver, their visits to places across the country, and the escape it allowed them from the ever-increasing tyranny seeping into their everyday lives. On 6 December 1936, as he notes above in his diary, that was now gone. But far worse was yet to come for Klemperer.

Although much of his sentiment is to stay, he begins to feel the pressure and thus frantically explores options to flee (“We must leave,” he writes on 3 December 1938). (His brother Georg, for example, has left already for the U.S. by this point.)

Curfews are now in place for Jews, concentration camps have been built, and many of Klemperer’s friends are en route to their new destinations (Lima, Tel Aviv, London, etc.). At one point, a friend comes over, District Judge Moral, and they, Klemperer explains, “hatched Rhodesia plans together, half jokingly, half in earnest; we puzzled over the future together”(252).

By the time the Klemperers reach out to the American Embassy, they find themselves on a waiting list that’s over two years long. Their fate is sealed: they will remain in Germany to “bear witness,” as his diary is titled, on how things will unfold violently. (These discussions on leaving are uncannily reminiscent of ones I’m having with friends now, one of whom has purchased an apartment in Europe if things truly go downhill — those who do not live in the U.S. continually ask me when I plan to leave here.)

Despite the terror surrounding them, plus the increasing financial difficulties they faced, Klemperer did not give up on his major scholarly projects. He writes about them as often as he writes about the everyday life banality of things (i.e., cleaning the house, cooking, taking care of their tomcat Muschel, etc.), along with the Nazi’s intrusion on their lives. His opus on the French Eighteenth Century (Das französische 18. Jahrhundert) is mentioned countless times, as is the Lingua tertii imperii (The Language of the Third Reich), the latter of which eventually becomes a book on how language came to be dominated by Nazi expressions in everyday life interactions.

Eventually, the Klemperers are forced out of their home and rehoused in the Jews’ House (Judenhaus) of “mixed couples” right before the war begins. Despite being humiliated by the Hitler Youth and others, being forced to wear the Star of David as identification of his “Jewishness,” and bearing witness to deportations while also learning about the horrors of Buchenwald and Auschwitz, the Klemperers still do not fully grasp the severity of the situation. Perhaps this denial is a form of psychological self-protection from the daily terror reaching their own doorstep. Furthermore, hunger is rampant, with food rations now the norm.

At one point, Klemperer is also sentenced to eight days in jail (he and his wife failed to put up blackout curtains, and thus, the jail sentence is the punishment he receives for that infraction). He goes to Cell 89 at the police station from June 23 to July 1, 1941. The diary entry in which he describes his time imprisoned is beyond harrowing. It is a lengthy, emotionally moving testament to the dehumanization of incarceration. The eight days, as he describes in detail, feel more like 80 years of imprisonment as he loses track of time, makes up memory games, and tries his best to wrestle with his sanity.

By 1941, too, Klemperer is no longer facing things in a semi-denial-like state. He must hide his diary; smoking for Jews has been banned, searching for food is a constant, and he is now aware of the “even more shocking reports about deportations of Jews to Poland.” Terror is all-encompassing, and he fears the Gestapo will raid their home like the rest of the Jews in his complex. He is also now fully cognizant that being sent to a concentration camp is akin to a death sentence. Many friends and friends of friends, soon to be deported, are, horrifyingly, choosing suicide over the concentration camps. Yet, despite the grimness of their situation, the Klemperers continue to survive. In fact, his fortitude seems to have improved since his writings of the mid-1930s.

At the end of 1941, he wraps up his journal, describing their celebration with their neighbors, the Kreidls, in their apartment downstairs:

That it was our most dreadful year, dreadful because of our own real experience, more dreadful because of the constant state of threat, most dreadful of all because of what we saw others suffering (deportations, murder), but that at the end it brought optimism — I quote widely: nil inultum remanebit [nothing will go unpunished]. My adhortatio [words of encouragement] was: Head held high for the difficult last five minutes!

A mantra in his writings, at least up until the end of 1941 (I have only just begun the second volume of his diaries), is the hope that the regime will soon fall. For those aware of the current state of affairs, a similar sentiment is expressed often, a hope that our own regime will collapse sooner rather than later. So, as he encourages his friends, I will do the same: hold your heads up high, for perhaps there are just five more minutes left of this reckless, inane terror!

Stay tuned for the follow-up write-up to the second volume of Klemperer’s diaries (1942 - 1945).

1. Hermann Grünspan was a Polish-Jewish man who assassinated German Nazi Ernst vom Rath on 7 November 1938 in Paris. His murder was used as justification to carry out the Kristallnacht (“The Night of Broken Glass”), the pogrom of 9-10 November 1938.