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Modernism/Modernity 7.3 (2000) 487-507



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Review Essay

Diary of a Tightrope Walker: Victor Klemperer and His Posterity


Katie TrumpenerVictor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941. Trans. Martin Chalmers. New York: Random House, 1998. Pp. 519. $29.95 (cloth); $14.95 (paper).

Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942-1945. Trans. Martin Chalmers. New York: Random House, 1999. Pp. 556. $29.95.

Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich: LTI, Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist's Notebook. Trans. Martin Brady. London: Athlone Press, 2000. Pp. 296. $90.00.

Victor Klemperer, So sitze ich denn zwischen allen Stühlen: Tagebücher, 1945-1959. 2 vols. Ed. Walter Nowojski with Christian Löser. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1999. Pp. 1824. DM 98, 00.

Until recently, Victor Klemperer (1881-1960) was remembered, when at all, as a professor of French literature. His best-known work, The Language of the Third Reich, LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist's Notebook (published in 1947 as LTI: Notizbuch eines Philologen) applied philological principles and interests to the study of contemporary culture, in this case to language use in Nazi Germany. As this work detailed, Klemperer himself suffered under the Nazi regime. The son of a well-known Reform rabbi (and the cousin of conductor Otto Klemperer), Klemperer moved to Berlin as a child, studied at [End Page 487] various universities in Germany, France, Switzerland, and Italy, married pianist/composer/translator Eva Schlemmer in 1906, worked for seven years as a freelance writer (publishing books of fiction and nonfiction), and served briefly as a soldier during World War I. His first academic posts were in Naples and Munich. Appointed in 1920 as a professor of Romance languages at Dresden's Technical University, he edited a philological yearbook and published numerous scholarly monographs and surveys of French literary history.

By 1933, Klemperer was well-established as an academic. Then the advent of the Third Reich and the implementation of increasingly punitive anti-Semitic laws derailed his professorial career and profoundly disrupted his personal existence. Although he had converted to Protestantism in 1903 (and was baptized anew in 1912), he was nonetheless considered Jewish under the Nuremberg Laws. His marriage to a non-Jew (who stood by her husband despite repeated Nazi bullying and admonishments to divorce him) protected Klemperer from the most lethal forms of anti-Semitic persecution; the direct threat of deportation to a concentration or death camp came only in 1945. He nonetheless spent much of the Third Reich in mortal terror, under constant threat of physical violence (and physical collapse), and cut off ever more completely from the possessions, position, and relative privilege of his former life. Forced into early retirement, he eventually lost most of his pension, his house, his entitlement to use the university library, to use public transportation, to enter a movie theater. He was compelled to wear a Star of David in public, to move with his wife into cramped quarters in a series of "Jewish houses" (each a kind of miniature ghetto, subject to brutal police searches), and eventually, despite his age and heart condition, to perform heavy manual labor in the streets and factories of Dresden. Klemperer experienced at first hand the physical and psychic sufferings of the Jewish community. Near starvation, near despair, they waited for the end, the optimists anticipating the end of the war, the realists the known death awaiting them at Auschwitz. Through all of these tribulations, Klemperer continued writing; once he lost regular access to a scholarly library, he began to focus his scholarly energies on the LTI project and on Curriculum Vitae, a memoir of his early life in Wilhelmine Germany. At the same time, he chronicled his daily life under Nazism, continuing the diary he had been keeping since the age of seventeen.

The belated appearance of these autobiographical writings has sparked the current Klemperer revival. In 1989, the posthumous publication in Germany of Klemperer's 1370 page Curriculum Vitae: Erinnerungen eines Philologen, 1881-1918 (Curriculum vitae: memories...

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