More than 40 years after his death, the story of one ordinary Nazi-era German Jew comes to the stage, Derek Scally reports from Berlin
A white-haired man walks onstage clutching a briefcase to his chest. He puts the briefcase down to reveal a yellow Star of David with the word "Jude" (Jew) in the centre. The man, New York-based actor George Bartenieff, was just nine years old when he fled Berlin with his family in 1939, escaping the extermination of Europe's Jewry.
Seven decades later, he has returned to Berlin in the guise of another Jew who survived the war, Victor Klemperer, a university professor from Dresden.
Klemperer's diary, documenting the daily dehumanisation of Jews in Nazi Germany, was first published in 1995, 35 years after his death, under the title I Will Bear Witness. Now a one-man play breathes life into the understated horror of the diaries.
"I think German, I am German - I didn't decide it for myself, I cannot tear it out of myself," wrote Klemperer in March 1942, encapsulating in one simple sentence the dilemma facing Jews in Nazi Germany. They lived in what had been a civilised western European country and felt as German as their neighbours. The Nuremberg Laws identified Jews according to Nazi ideology, which classified them as a plague on ordinary decent Germans.
Victor Klemperer was an ordinary decent German. He was born in 1881, the fourth son of a rabbi in what is today Poland, but moved with his family to Berlin when he was nine. He converted to Protestantism as a young man, a requirement at the time to work as a civil servant. He married a Protestant woman, Eva, in 1906 and fought in the first World War and earned a medal for bravery. In 1920, he became the head of Romance languages and literature at Dresden's Technical University and was by all accounts a model German.
He had kept a diary since his teenage years but after Hitler rose to power in 1933, the document became a mission, an undertaking, a means of staying sane.
"I want to bear witness, precise witness, until the very end," he wrote in 1942, after his apartment building had been raided by the Gestapo and he and his neighbours had been beaten and humiliated.
His diary lived up to his vow and is a goldmine of information that detailed the slow, day-by-day dehumanisation of Jews under the Nazis.
Klemperer was classified as a Jew under the Nuremberg Laws, and his diary documents the growing list of forbidden activities and places. He was forbidden to go to the cinema, the library or the park. He was forbidden to use the telephone, buy a newspaper, buy eggs, vegetables, meat or bread. "It's not the big things that are important, but the everyday life of tyranny," he wrote. "A thousand mosquito bites are worse than a blow on the head. I observe, I notice the mosquito bites." He eventually lost his job and devoted himself to his diary, which details the worst of German behaviour - the beatings and jeering in the street - and the best, such as the non-Jewish German friends who refused to cut them out of their lives and even slipped them ration coupons.
Having an "Aryan" wife spared Klemperer from the worst of the persecution. However, it was the Allied fire-bomb attack on Dresden in 1945, that left 130,000 people dead, that saved his life. In the confusion, he fled with his wife to Bavaria.
After the war, he returned with his wife to Dresden where he lived another 15 years before dying in 1960. The diaries first emerged decades later and were published in Germany in 1995 and around the world in the following years.
The publication didn't interest George Bartenieff, who had settled in New York after fleeing Germany and had become a successful actor. Like many of his generation, he avoided the "Holocaust literature" genre and read the Klemperer diaries only after his wife, author Karen Malpede, had pressed the book into his hand.
"I don't think Klemperer's diary is your typical Holocaust literature, otherwise I probably wouldn't have got past the first page," says Bartenieff. "So much love is in this diary, so much humanity, so much violence and poetry." The piece is a labour of love for the 69-year-old actor and his wife.
They each read the diaries five times before comparing their notes and producing a script that concentrates on the years from 1942 to 1945 when the persecution of German Jews and the war reached their climax. The one-man show had its première last year Off Broadway in New York, where it won a prestigious OBIE prize. Bartenieff took the play on tour.
"After London, I knew for certain, this piece has to go to Berlin," he says. The show, in English, opened here last week to ecstatic reviews in the German press.
With little more than a table, chair and coat-stand, Bartenieff brings to life the author of the diaries with small but telling gestures: a man who is physically weak but intellectually vital.
"I feel brave because I dare to record everything," wrote Klemperer in 1942, a typically laconic entry that belies the reality of his undertaking. The hardship of daily life meant that few persecuted Jews documented their struggle. For a Jew, keeping a diary meant an instant death sentence if discovered.
Klemperer's home was repeatedly searched and the volumes of diaries, eventually totalling more than 1,600 pages, were always in danger of being found.
Klemperer referred to his diaries as his "balancing pole" through the war years, without which he "would have fallen a hundred times". His tireless diary keeping preserved forever the banal horror of Nazi Germany. Now, though George Bartenieff's virtuoso performance, the horror once again becomes a living experience to which every audience member bears witness.