Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer: Intimate Chronicles in Turbulent Times

3 Victor Klemperer and the Shock of Multiple Identities

In 1968 Hannah Arendt published a study of exemplary lives under the self-explanatory title Men in Dark Times.1 Victor Klemperer does not ¤gure there, although he would have been a most ¤tting subject. Arendt did not know, indeed it appears—somewhat strangely—did not even know of, Klemperer.2 This is to be regretted, for Klemperer must be considered the pioneer of the study of totalitarian language, perhaps to this day one of its most insightful analysts. Arendt’s 1951 The Origins of Totalitarianism does not mention, but would have been immeasurably enriched by, Klemperer’s LTI—Notebook of a Philologist, which had appeared in 1947.3 Klemperer was able to publish the book very quickly after the war because it represented the fruit of re®ections that a fascinated and repelled Klemperer had made ¤rsthand and systematically recorded in his diary throughout the Nazi years. LTI—Lingua Tertii Imperii—was the coded term Klemperer used at the time 3 And the Shock Victor Klemperer of Multiple Identities for “the language of the Third Reich.”4 This marvelously personal,5 richly nuanced study of the content, structure, and corrupting dynamics of the German language under Nazism is no doubt a classic; yet strangely enough, it has remained, until recently, relatively neglected.6 Arendt, of course, could not possibly have known about Klemperer’s diaries as they appeared many years after her death. In unique and detailed fashion they document and illuminate the unfolding of dark times in Germany under Nazism. Their recent publication, covering both National Socialism7 and the period of the Weimar Republic,8 has already rescued Klemperer from his previous obscurity. In this respect, his case is quite different from that of both Scholem and Arendt. Interest in their letters and diaries derives from our familiarity with their thought and published writings; with Klemperer it is the diaries themselves that have drawn attention and that may now generate interest in his other work.9 The diaries were widely acclaimed, became a major best seller, and brought immediate fame to Klemperer in Germany when they appeared in the mid-1990s.10 Some critics have argued that there may be some disturbing reasons for this enthusiastic reception. After all, for all the suffering and persecution they endured, Klemperer and his wife survived the Third Reich and, indeed, experienced , from fellow Germans, occasional gestures of compassion , each of which Klemperer carefully noted. Because his wife, Eva, was a Protestant, they were spared the ultimacy of the death camps. As Paolo Traverso has perceptively noted, the popularity of the diaries in Germany —like those of Anne Frank (which break off at the moment of deportation and extermination)—derives from the fact that they remain within the bounds of the comprehensible . They are still somehow contained within the Victor Klemperer and the Shock of Multiple Identities 71 codes of everyday life, not entirely removed from the realm of private, bourgeois experience. They record, in the face of incredible odds, the maintenance and triumph of human values.11 They provide a distraction from the greater, total horror, as well as an alternative to the picture of an unrelieved, deeply ingrained, and inexorably murderous popular German antisemitism that Daniel Goldhagen presented in Germany at roughly the same time.12 Like Schindler ’s List, Klemperer’s diary contains at least some good Germans and a happy ending. It should be clear, however, that the possible misuse of these documents in no way detracts from their immense documentary value. They are particularly relevant in our context. In the ¤rst place, Klemperer records and illuminates public life, the epoch-making events and atmosphere of his times, from a most personal perspective and in remarkably detailed, quotidian, humanizing fashion . The dif¤culties and humiliations as well as the absurdities that confronted a Jew living in prewar Nazi Germany are poignantly brought home. The diaries record, in painstaking yet compelling detail, the enormous problems created, for instance, by the everyday tasks of maintaining a car and a garden or building a house. In this context such normally innocuous matters become charged, almost surreal activities. With the wisdom of hindsight one may well ask which Jew in the Third Reich would be obsessed with keeping a garden, learning to drive, building a house? But, of course, given both Klemperer’s objective situation and his ideological outlook, this was an essential part of his insoluble dilemma. More than...