FROM THE BOOKSHELF

There were once plus/minus 4000 books in my library, on 22 shelves (and stacked on the floor), in my garage, while my car faded in the driveway. There are 500 fewer now, for as is wont with older folks, I am "downsizing." Not an easy task, giving away your friends of a lifetime---to strangers who might abuse them.

That said, to say this. I am often asked what are your favorite books? That is a hard one, since there are dozens and dozens of favorites. There are a few, however, that I will never forget.  Among perhaps my TOP TEN of all time are Victor Klemperer's (1881-1960) two books, I WILL BEAR WITNESS: A DIARY OF THE NAZI YEARS, 1933-1941 and  I WILL BEAR WITNESS: THE NAZI YEARS, 1942-1945.

A Dresden Jew, a veteran of WWI, a distinguished professor of the French Enlightenment, a man of letters and a historian of great talent and perception, Klemperer recognized the danger of Hitler as early as 1933. His diaries, written in secrecy, provide a vivid picture of life as it was in Hitler's Germany.

The New York Times said of Klemperer's account:  " in its cool, lucid style and power of observation, it is the best written, most evocative, most observant record of daily life in the Third Reich". ....." a work of literature..."

Quaint homespun snippets remain in my mind from reading these books---he and his wife finally got a little new "farmhouse" built in the suburbs, (only to eventually have it confiscated), they sat together at night and read books to each other, he finally learned to drive a car---only to have his license taken away by the Nazis. They somehow escaped concentration camps, perhaps because of her lineage, but wound up sharing a room with other Jews in a large apartment building, packed with Jews. After the bombing of Dresden, they managed to melt into a crowd of refugees, and thus survived the war.

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I WILL BEAR WITNESS: A DIARY OF THE NAZI YEARS, 1933-1941

Amazon Review:

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Victor Klemperer (1881-1960), honored as a frontline veteran of World War I, was a distinguished professor at the University of Dresden. A scant few months later he was merely a Jew, protected from deportation to a death camp only by his marriage to an Aryan. He suffered every other indignity to which German Jews were subjected, from losing his job to having his driver's license revoked to being denied permission to own a pet, and all are recorded with bitter clarity in his diary entries, which cover the years 1933 to 1941. (A second volume continuing through 1945 will be published in English in 1999.) The German edition of this book caused a sensation when it was published in 1995, and it's easy to see why: the relentless, quotidian nature of Nazi racism comes through forcefully in Klemperer's litany of daily humiliations and insults, a painful chronicle of situations in which readers can readily imagine themselves. Like Anne Frank, but with a more adult understanding of political fanaticism and human weakness, he makes the abstract horror of genocidal persecution very intimate, very personal, and very real. --Wendy Smith --

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I WILL BEAR WITNESS: A DIARY OF THE NAZI YEARS, 1942-1945

Amazon Review

The second volume of Victor Klemperer's searing diary, kept in secret during the 12 years he suffered under the Nazi regime, covers the period from 1942 to 1945. The humiliations visited on even such "privileged" Jews as Klemperer (whose wife was Aryan) grew increasingly severe, with house searches, arbitrary arrests, and brutal beatings becoming virtually routine. The 60-year-old historian is forced to shovel snow despite his heart condition; hunger gnaws at him as rations are mercilessly cut. Yet he clings to an intellectual life, continuing his reading and making notes on the lies and obfuscations of official Nazi discourse that would become his postwar masterpiece, Lingua Tertii Imperii. "The Russians, who have only just been annihilated, are tremendous and quite inexhaustible opponents," he notes sardonically after reading a mendacious fascist article in 1942. His lengthy account of his escape with his wife from Dresden after the Allied bombings of 1945 unforgettably captures the chaos of World War II's final days and the mixed feelings of a Jew who could never wholeheartedly gloat over the defeat of the nation that had persecuted him. Above all, his unflinching depiction of human nature and society in extremis amply justifies his cherished belief that even the Nazis "cannot prevent language from testifying to the truth." --Wendy Smith --
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You are in great luck! Both these volumes are in print and may be ordered from AMAZON!

Victor Klemperer

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BY MIL
5/06/13


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