Trudging to Survival and Success

Review of Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933-1941, trans. Martin Chalmers. New York: Random House, 1998. ISBN 0679456961, 519 pp., $29.95.

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How was it possible for Victor Klemperer, a Protestant, to become a Jewish victim of Nazism? The obvious answer to that question is, of course, that he was born a Jew and converted—twice! Klemperer was an associate professor at the University of Munich for a year and, since 1920, a full professor at the Technical University, Halle, Germany. He was “Retired from his duties in accordance with the [Nazi] Law to Re-establish a Professional Civil Service” in 1935 (p. 500). He described this process and the minutiae of his private life in tedious detail in his voluminous secret diaries, Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten: Tagebücher 1933-1945 von Victor Klemperer (1995).

These diaries were abridged and translated into English by Martin Chalmers. Why the translator stopped with the December 1941 entries is not explained; however, a second volume covering the remaining years will be published November 15, 1999. In a 22-page Preface, Chalmers records most major events in Klemperer’s life, including the catastrophic bombing of Dresden, which, paradoxically, saved Klemperer’s life. In the confusion of the raging firestorm, he tore the identifying yellow Star of David, which all Jews had to wear, off his outer garment, and he and his “full Aryan” wife, Eva, merged into the crowds. They left Dresden and traveled west, claiming to have lost their papers in the air raid. Three months later, they arrived in a Bavarian village occupied by American forces.

While Klemperer’s family history is recorded in the Preface to I Will Bear Witness and his literary accomplishments in a Chronology appended to the text of the book, his conversions to Protestantism were ignored by the translator. Victor was born in Landsberg an der Warthe on October 9, 1881, the youngest of nine children. His father, who held a doctorate, was a reform rabbi who moved his family to Berlin in 1890. Victor’s oldest brother Georg, 16 years Victor’s senior, was a famous surgeon; the next; a well-known lawyer; and the third, a successful physician. All three had converted to Protestantism, and Georg, often arrogating a paternal role to himself vis-a-vis Victor, prevailed upon him to convert in 1903, just after the completion of his university preparatory education (subsequent to a commercial apprenticeship, which had not suited him at all). In his earlier books, Curriculum Vitae: Jugend um 1900 (Curriculum Vitae: Youth around 1900) (1989) and Curriculum Vitae: Erinnerungen (eines Philologen) 1881-1918 (Curriculum Vitae: Memories [of a Philologist] 1881-1918) (1989), Klemperer recorded how uncomfortable he had been with the declaration of belief in the Trinity. Accordingly, in 1906, at his civil marriage ceremony to Eva Schlemmer, a pianist and musicologist, he did not officially identify himself as Protestant. However, in 1913, again for unstated reasons, Klemperer found a minister who was willing to convert him without the declaration of belief in the Trinity; all that was required was a promise of loyalty to the Protestant Church. One can surmise that, at the time, Klemperer, who had worked as a journalist between 1905 and 1912 and received his doctorate in 1913, wished to make himself more acceptable for a university appointment. He could hardly have been motivated by anything other than opportunism, because he was a non-believer through and through. He recorded his discomfort when, on the occasion of a Friday night meal in the home of Jewish friends, the men kept their heads covered while eating and reciting the traditional prayers. Similarly, an entry on January 24, 1933, recounts part of a conversation when his friend Annemarie tells Klemperer of a mutual acquaintance’s death:

‘Where is his immortal soul? There are happy people who firmly believe in it.’ Annemarie, almost shocked, very vigorously: ‘But Victor! Every Christian does!’ So she, the surgeon, who has the corpse, the brain under her knife, who has a university education—and yet quite evidently for all her cynicism and lack of religiosity—is at bottom a believer (3).

On November 12, 1939, Klemperer wrote, “Either 25 percent of income tax has to be paid to the National Association of Jews or 13 percent to it and 12 percent to the church. So in accordance with my confessional bigamy” he paid to both. And he added, “The Jewish Communities in Germany today are all extremely inclined to Zionism; I shall go along with that just as little as I do with National Socialism or with Bolshevism. Liberal and German forever” (pp. 318-319). Just four years earlier, on Sunday July 21, 1935, Klemperer had recorded a conversation with an acquaintance who had returned from a visit to Jerusalem to report that a certain immigrant “feels at home and yet previously ‘had been assimilated as you were, Herr Professor.’ I replied: ‘Were? I am German forever, German nationalist. The Nazis are un-German’” (p. 129).

No matter how German they felt and regardless of how patriotically they fought alongside their Christian-German comrades during

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World War I, as did Klemperer in 1915-1916, neither the Protestant nor the Catholic Church protected its converts during the Nazi era. After World War II, an SS officer expressed regrets that, in their battle against the church, the SS had committed a grave sin, and closed his appeal to Bishop Hans Meiser to include the SS men in his spiritual work with the biblical words, “‘Ask and ye shall be given.’“ Bishop Meiser replied with Jesus’s words, “‘Whoever comes to me, I will not cast aside.’ [Thus,] in the same measure as the churches remained silent about the persecution of victims before 1945, so they committed themselves after 1945 to [saving] the perpetrators” (Ernst Klee, “Vergebung ohne Reue” (“Forgiveness [Pardon] without Remorse”), Die Zeit, pp. 9-21 February 1992:49).

The official church and university policies notwithstanding, most of Klemperer’s non-Jewish friends, shopkeepers, and laborers remained in contact with him. When direct contact became impossibly dangerous, they attempted to assist him indirectly and to comfort him until the bitter end—indeed risking their own safety by secretly storing the Diary. To these notations, interspersed throughout the diary, Chalmer reacts with disbelief in the pervasive German “eliminationist anti-Semitism” (pp. xv-xvi ) proposed by Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996).

On December 3, 1938, the Day of German Solidarity, Klemperer recounted the previous day’s meeting with “Striege or Striegel, who is in charge of the lending section” of the library. A year ago he had announced the reading room ban so he now showed me the complete ban on using the library. The man was distressed beyond words, I had to calm him. He stroked my hand the whole time, he could not hold back the tears, he stammered, ‘I am boiling over inside. If only [o]ne could get at them. But not just kill them—torture, torture, torture.’ Even before that Fräulein Roth, very pale, had gripped my hand in the catalog room.” Then he added, “But these few, sympathizing and in despair, are isolated, and they too are afraid. The developments of the last few days have at least rid us of inner uncertainty; there is no longer any choice: We must leave.

He felt as if he “could not breathe,” could not “bear it anymore” (pp. 277-278).

Too late! The immigration quotas were restrictive and Victor Klemperer lacked the funds to buy his way out of Germany and into another country. In fact, unlike his successful older brothers, he had always been in poor financial straits. Throughout this Diary—and throughout his prior journals—Victor whimpered and moaned about money. Earlier, when he was a journalist, his penury was due to the uncertainty of selling his articles; later, due to the certainty of not placing them because of his Jewish background; and finally, when he was forced to retire, due to the cut in his meager university salary. His wife Eva seemed oblivious. Enervated by real or imagined ailments and often severely depressed, her goal in life was to build a little house outside the city. Victor complied, agonized, and borrowed funds from his brother, whose assets had been frozen in Germany at the time of his emigration to the United States. The house was built, but before long, the couple had to endure the humiliation as well as the camaraderie of living in the cramped, primitive quarters of a Judenhaus, a Jewhouse. It was from there that they escaped during the night of the Dresden bombing.

After the war, Klemperer returned to Dresden in the German Democratic Republic and joined the Communist Party despite his prior criticism of Bolshevism. Uncharacteristically, Klemperer became politically active; he was determined to punish the academics who had supported Nazism, and he demonstrated for the victims of Fascism. In Ich will Zeugnis ablegen he declared in November, 1945, that only the Communist Party is intent on a radical elimination of the Nazis. However, he is aware that it replaces the Nazi restrictions on freedom with new ones. In 1946 he yearned to assist in the “pumping out of the German cesspool” so that the country will become decent again.

What makes I Will Bear Witness both interesting and tedious reading are the minutiae. Pedantic day-by-day accounts of the meetings with friends, the food and drink served or restricted, Eva’s depressions, Victor’s heart problems, his resentment about having to do housework when Jews were no longer allowed to employ “aryan” help, the exact amounts of money to be paid and the paucity of funds—altogether they convey the effects of the political changes as they impacted individual lives. Klemperer attempted to save his sanity by continuing his work on French literature and his LTI, a philological treatise on Nazi terminology, that is, the words and acronyms coined to represent the Nazi doctrine (LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen

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(Language of the Third Reich: Journal of a Philologist), 1975).

Klemperer seems to have embodied the best and the worst of what is German. He was committed to scholarship, culture, and decency. And he was staid, ponderous and plodding, conservative and slow to act. “Trudging” was Klemperer’s style, always limping behind as a result of his fearfulness and indecision. His personal development progressed by fits and starts. As the youngest, he was last in a family of achievers; he had much to live up to and often felt inadequate and uncomfortable in the presence of his condescending oldest brother:

I have never made an impression on my family. What [a] celebration there usually is for a school graduation, doctorate, a professorship, etc! Whenever I got that far, it was already nothing out of the ordinary in my family—m’ont devancé mes neveux (my nephews surpassed me) (p. 129).

Taking two steps forward and one step backward, he aborted his education and resumed it with his brother’s encouragement and financial support. He disavowed religion but let himself be baptized twice. He abjured Bolshevism no less than Nazism, but joined the Communist Party. He experimented with two vocations before settling on an academic career. Last to arrive in the family and late in starting his life, he was 38 when appointed to the associate professorship in Munich. Steeped in 18th- and 19th-century French literature, he was late in becoming aware of the 20th-century assaults on reason.

“Modernism” had passed him by, and perhaps on that account, too, he underestimated the power of National Socialist doctrines. Like many other Germans, Klemperer was late in recognizing that Nazism was not a temporary, “un-German” phenomenon and late in realizing that—notwithstanding his lack of confidence in his ability to earn his livelihood in a foreign country—emigration would be a safer route to take. In 1938, when he could not “bear it anymore,” he was already 57 years old. To his credit, Victor Klemperer remained professionally active, teaching and writing, until his death in his 79th year on February 11, 1960.

While the translation of Victor Klemperer’s Diary is accurate and easy to read, it was impossible to keep track of the many characters. (A diagrammed family tree would have been immensely helpful.) Despite this and the tediousness of sloshing through the recorded details, this reader could not give up. What would happen next? Where would it end? For anyone wishing to learn about the effects on individual lives of the progressive, stifling restrictions of organized tyranny, the book to read is I Will Bear Witness.

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