Speech and Blood: Victor Klemperer's Tagebücher, 1933-45: Review Essay

122 SHOFAR Fall 1998 Vol. 17, No.1 Speech and Blood: Victor Klemperer's Tagebucher,1933-45 Review Essay Lawrence Birken Ball State University Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zurn Letzten, Vols. 1 and 2, by Victor Klemperer. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1996. c. 1700 pp. DM 128.00. The fate ofthe Jews ofthe Greater German Reich was perhaps the most inexplicable (if not the most terrible) ofNazism's crimes against humanity. The murder of millions of foreign Jews could at least be partially concealed in the general horror of the Second World War; the cries of dying children in some obscure Polish town could hardly disturb the serenity of the average bourgeois in Vienna or Munich. But the German Jews were another matter. How does one explain the fate of Frau Rosen, the kindly teacher at the local school, or Dr. Katz, the gentle physician who only wanted to care for people's eyes? One day, respected members of the community. The next, degraded outcasts. How could people stand by when their next-door neighbors were ridiculed, humiliated, and driven from their homes? How could a nation tum against its own? And what did it mean to those who were stripped of their national identity, in a world in which one's national identity had become synonymous with one's humanity? Victor Klemperer, a Protestant German of Jewish origins, was in a unique position to answer these questions. An aging, relatively obscure professor of French literature and philology at the Technical College of Dresden, Klemperer miraculously managed to avoid deportation and almost certain death thanks to the boundless courage of his "Aryan" wife Eva and his own inexhaustible will to live. During those twelve years, the self-consciously German Klemperer was gradually degraded from being a proud member ofthe intellectual aristocracy to a half-dead non-person marked with a yellow star. We can follow the stages of this degradation, in all its excruciating cruelty, because Klemperer kept a diary. At terrible risk to himself (as well as his wife and his friends) he ultimately amassed over five thousand pages of notes chronicling what can only be described as a descent into hell. The notes remained unpublished until, after being organized by Klemperer's former student Walter Nowojsky and his second wife Hadwig, they were put out in a two-volume set in 1995 by Aufbau-Verlag with the full Victor Klemperer's Tagebilcher: Review Essay 123 title Tagebiicher: Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten. l The diaries, despite their length, were an immediate, if controversial success. Klemperer, it turned out, had something for everyone. His fierce nationalism galvanized the Right as much as his anti-Nazism inspired the Left.2 A 13-part miniseries for German TV and an English translation were soon in the planning stage&. But while the Tagebiicher qualify as high drama and even tragedy, they also have a deeper significance. During his twelve years of internal exile Klemperer (with the help ofhis wife) was forced to radically reassess his status as a German and a human being. I. Victor Klemperer was born on October 9, 1881 in Landsburg, the son ofa reform Rabbi who soon moved his family to Berlin. But Klemperer's own Judaism was hardly more than vestigial. A born freethinker, he threw himself headlong into the mainstream of German cultural life, studying at Munich and Berlin, as well as Paris and Rome, returning to Berlin as a journalist, before finally completing his Habilitation with Karl Vossler in 1914. In the meantime, Klemperer had converted to Protestantism in 1912. With a number of publications under his belt, he volunteered for military service, fighting on the Western front and receiving the Bavarian Service Cross for his efforts. From 1916 to 1918, he was a censor for the military government in Leipzig (TB1, 617, n. 49). K1emperer resumed his academic career with a visiting assistant professorship at the University of Munich in 1919 before coming to Dresden in 1920 with the rank of "ordinary" professor where he would further distinguish himself with an excellent record of publications. At his side since 1906 was his cultured wife, the pianist Eva Schlemmer. Their relationship seems to have been...