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Cold Brave Heart
- University of Nebraska Press
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On February 13 and 14, 1945, the baroque city of Dresden went up in flames under the impact of massive British and American air raids. Among the thousands scrambling over the ruins in an attempt to escape the firestorm was an elderly couple; he with a star of David on his chest, she without. At first Victor Klemperer and his wife Eva lost sight of one another, and to make matters worse, he was nearly blinded by the flying debris. When they met again, Eva, on the advice of a Jewish friend, tore off the star that her husband had been wearing for three and a half years. From that moment on, he was no longer a Jew precariously protected from deportation by his marriage to an “Aryan.” They were now homeless refugees, two among millions of other Germans, prisoners of war, foreign laborers, and the East European allies of the Nazis fleeing from the Red Army. Although he was worried that he would be unmasked as a Jew, Klemperer had in reality little to fear. The Gestapo building had been destroyed in the air raid together with the documentation on the few Jews who were still in Dresden. In any case, people had more important things to worry about than whether there was a Jew among those eating the soup that was ladled out by young women of the National Socialist Welfare. Victor Klemperer, born a Jew, had converted to Protestantism more than three decades earlier. Although Hitler now remade him a Jew, he felt no loyalty to Jewishness or to the Jewish tradition. He had been a German before the persecution began and now that there was no record of his being a Jew he was C O L D B R A V E H E A R T This is the full reprint of my review of Victor Klemperer’s I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of Nazi Years, 1942–1945 (translated from the German by Martin Chalmers; New York: Random House, 1999), which appeared under the title “Cold Brave Heart” in the April 17–April 24, 2000, issue of the New Republic. 51 a German again—not a fanatical one, but a German humanist in the cosmopolitan tradition of Lessing and Goethe. Since 1920 Klemperer had been a professor of Romance literature at the Dresden Technical Academy, and although he was sent into retirement in 1935, he received his state pension almost to the end of the Nazi regime. A few months after the end of the war, he would again be teaching at the Academy, and when he finally retired, in 1954, he would do so as a respected university professor in East Berlin. During this long career, Klemperer left his homeland only for professional reasons and brief vacations; he never seriously contemplated emigration. We, too, must regard Klemperer as a German whom Nazi perversity condemned to a pariah existence for a few years. It is true that, unlike his own brothers, he had never tried to “pass,” nor did he feel, like many assimilated Jews, that fate was treating him unfairly. In his reckoning he was not really one of “them.” Klemperer was both a victim and a cool observer; an individualist with a critical view of himself and of those around him. It is these qualities that make his diaries of such immense value: they present an unprejudiced picture of everyday life in Germany, of Jews and non-Jews. Klemperer’s massive journals encompass the years between 1918 and 1959. They were first published, in German, between 1994 and 1999, in several thousand pages. All the volumes are abbreviated versions of the handwritten or typed manuscript. An English version covering the years 1933–1941 appeared in 1998; the present volume covers the years 1942–1945. They can be complemented by two other works, produced while Klemperer was writing his diaries : Curriculum Vitae, the reminiscences of his younger years, and lti, or Lingua Tertii Imperii, which analyzes the Third Reich’s perversion of the German language. lti (1947) was published in East Germany, and since then it has appeared in many new editions, even an edition enriched with copious notes in English. Most of lti’s contents had originally formed a part of Klemperer’s diaries; these sections are understandably missing from the diaries’ English translation . lti explains, often brilliantly, the Nazis’ use of the German language as well as their invention of archaic-sounding terms, all with an aggressive, combative content. The...