I Shall Bear Witness: the Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1933-41 trans. Martin Chalmers Weidenfeld & Nicolson 500 pp, £20 in UK
This book, which has received widespread notice already, is a remarkable document in spite of its often plodding pace and long-windedness. The translation is an abridged version of the German original, and it is intended to bring out the remainder of Klemperer's diaries in a second volume. Frankly, this seems too much, or at least a bit much; severe pruning might have condensed them into a single volume without much obvious loss, and even possible gain. The diaries contain much fascinating material, but also a good deal of inferior interest - nor was Klemperer as a personality really interesting enough in himself to merit two solid volumes which, after all, cover only a short period of his life.
He was a Jew and an academic, a professor of Romance languages in Dresden, and a strong francophile - as many cultured Germans tend to be. Previously he had been a journalist and film critic, and had fought with some distinction as a volunteer in the German Army in the first World War. Without the advent of Nazism his career would have been relatively unremarkable, the average one of a scholar-academic in a regional capital, devoted to lecturing, scholarly research, the publication of monographs, occasional trips abroad and, no doubt, academic politics. Klemperer was married, apparently happily, to an "Aryan" i.e. a racial German, and his other love (scholarship apart) was his cat. In more normal times, he would scarcely have been known outside academic circles.
The times, however, were entirely abnormal and out of joint. In the early chapters there is still plenty of contact with the outer world and with friends and colleagues abroad, though Hitler's political presence was already spreading a dark cloud over public life. Like many other German Jews, Klemperer was loyal to his country and his culture - he disliked Zionism - and found it terribly hard to accept that the sky was darkening for people such as him, and would continue to darken. He was a typical middle-class liberal of his kind, intelligent and wide awake to political and social realities, not a man to fool himself but not a man either to expect the worst. Yet as anti-Semitism grew increasingly virulent, and people around him began to vanish, he could not shut out the living nightmare of the new Germany.
War with France and England brought out in many ordinary, non-Nazi people an outburst of chauvinism and lunatic optimism. Hitler, cleverly, had used war with foreign powers as a means of uniting Germany behind him and his regime - a strategy, of course, which brought short-term success and eventual ruin. Before that, the annexation of Austria in 1938 had filled Klemperer with revulsion and foreboding. Nationalist propaganda was incessant, though it regularly shifted its targets as Hitler sought one political or military alliance, then another; a treaty with Stalin was followed by the invasion of Russia, and bombastic bulletins about "nine million people" (!) grappling together in battle. Meanwhile, the screw tightened relentlessly on the Jews and on all Jewish institutions and resources; at one stage, quite ludicrously, they were even forbidden to smoke.
Still Klemperer carried on, depressed by his wife's poor health and low spirits, losing his beloved cat, trying to go on with his literary studies but unable now to ignore the mass deportation of Jews and the distress of neighbours or friends. Finally, even his typewriter was taken away. The last pages of the book list Germany's declaration of war on the US, his own house arrest, and then detention with other families in the "Jews' House". Somehow he and his wife, Eva, managed to celebrate New Year's Eve after "our most dreadful year, dreadful because of our own experience, more dreadful because of the constant state of threat, most dreadful of all because of what we saw others suffering."
Apparently he survived both the bombing of Dresden and the Holocaust, spending the last months of the war in hiding. After that, Saxony became part of East Germany and the Communist lands, and Klemperer returned to his old career as an academic, dying in 1960. His book is no literary-intellectual masterpiece - it is too diffuse and too laden down with the ephemera of day-to-day living for that, and like most Germans at the time he lived in a fog of rumour and supposition, increasingly cut off from political and other realities outside his immediate circle. As a case history, however, it is often gripping, and the mere keeping of a diary in such circumstances, and under such pressures, was in itself a genuine act of bravery and affirmation.