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I Will Bear Witness 1942-1945
by Victor Klemperer
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Random House (2000-03-21)
ISBN: 0375502408
EAN: 9780375502408
Dewy Decimal #: 943.086092
Hardcover: 576 pages
Release Date: 2000-03-21
SKU: 41943
Condition: New
Comments: GIFT QUALITY! THE HARDBACK BOOK! RANDOM HOUSE, 1998. THE UNABRIDGED 1ST EDITION, HARDCOVER W/GILT LETTERING, DUST JACKET AND PAGES ARE NEW. RAPID SHIPPING W/FREE TRACKING, GREAT PACKAGING. Air Mail.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
"The best written, most evocative, most observant record of daily life in the Third Reich."
-Amos Elon, The New York Times
Victor Klemperer risked his life to preserve these diaries so that he could, as he wrote, "bear witness" to the gathering hor-ror of the Nazi regime. The son of a Berlin rabbi, Klemperer was a German patriot who served with honor during the First World War, married a gentile, and converted to Protestantism. He was a professor of Romance languages at the Dresden Technical Institute, a fine scholar and writer, and an intellectual of a somewhat conservative disposition.
Unlike many of his Jewish friends and academic colleagues, he feared Hitler from the start, and though he felt little allegiance to any religion, under Nazi law he was a Jew. In the years 1933 to 1941, covered in the first volume of these diaries, Klemperer's life is not yet in danger, but he loses his professorship, his house, even his typewriter; he is not allowed to drive, and since Jews are forbidden to own pets, he must put his cat to death. Because of his military record and marriage to a "full-blooded Aryan," he is spared deportation, but nevertheless, Klemperer has to wear the yellow Jewish star, and he and his wife, Eva, are subjected to the ever-increasing escalation of Nazi tyranny. The distinguished historian Peter Gay, in The New York Times Book Review, wrote that Klemperer's "personal history of how the Third Reich month by month, sometimes week by week, accelerated its crusade against the Jews gives as accurate a picture of Nazi trickery and brutality as we are likely to have...a report from the interior that tells the horrifying story of the evolving Nazi persecution...with a concrete, vivid power that is, and I think will remain, unsurpassed."
This volume begins in 1942, the year of the Final Solution, and ends in 1945, with the devastation of Hitler's Germany. Rumors of the death camps soon reach the Jews of Dresden, now jammed into their so-called Jews' houses, starved, humiliated, subject day and night to Gestapo raids, and terrified as, one by one, their neighbors are taken away. Klemperer is made to shovel snow, is assigned to do forced labor in a factory, is taunted on the streets by gangs of boys, but his life is spared, thanks to the privileged status of Jews married to Aryans. In the final days of the war, however, even Jews in mixed marriages are summoned to report for transport to "labor camps," which Klemperer now knows means death, and that his turn will soon come. He is saved by the great Dresden air raid of February 13, 1945; he and his wife survive the fiery destruction of their city and make their way to the Allied lines. "In the enthralling and appalling final pages of this miraculous work," wrote Niall Ferguson in the London Sunday Telegraph, "Klemperer all too soon encounters the deliberate amnesia of the defeated Germany: 'What is "Gestapo"?' declares a Breslau woman he encounters in May 1945. 'I've never heard the word. I've never been interested in politics, I don't know anything about the persecution of the Jews.'" Says Ferguson, "Of all the books I have read on this subject, I find it hard to think of one which has taught me more."
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Amazon.com 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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Customer Reviews
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Final Journey to freedom
Rating  (5)
Date: 2007-09-03
One should read this book only after the first volume covering the years 1933-41. The story of Victor & Eva's survival of detention in the Jews' house, the Dresden bombing and subsequent wanderings stunned me. But Victor's courage in continuing his secret diary for 12 years comes through - as does his humanity ad personal growth.
The diary jotting sryle means you pick it up and read a section at a time, but you will most likely be drawn into finishing it within a short time.
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Great Book
Rating (5)
Date: 2007-02-09
4 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
And I will get the other years of this author's diary. This is not a fast paced WWII battle book; this is the diary of a poor soul who had to live through every moment of a terrible regime, to endure even more when he thought he'd reached his limit. If you're interested in what it was like to live day to day in Hitler's Germany (as a Jew or a gentile)--to understand what it was like to watch it begin and grow and eventually implode--this is an excellent read. I would say it is for those deeply interested in the psychology of the times; not a passing interest. I'll get the other books and read them in order of the years they cover. I really want to understand how the Third Reich could ever BE.
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A Courageous, One-of-a-Kind View Inside Nazi Germany
Rating (5)
Date: 2006-07-04
5 out of 5 customers found this reveiw helpful
This is actually the second volume of Klemperer's diaries, published in two volumes. I highly recommend that you buy both volumes as a set and read from the beginning how a bureaucratic mindset advanced towards ultimate evil.
In the end, Klemperer's diary doesn't fully answer the haunting question, "How could it have happened?" But you will find some definitive answers here to questions that Holocaust scholars have debated over the years.
For example, Klemperer's experience answers the charge that virtually all Aryan Germans knew from the beginning exactly what the Third Reich's intentions were towards the Jews. Klemperer's actual interactions stand as refutation of this blanket indictment. Often when he visited Aryan acquaintances to conduct business - he would then jovially be invited to come back that evening for schnapps. Klemperer had to explain that he couldn't come back later for schnapps - that as a Jew, he was prohibited from boarding any vehicle of public transportation after 6:00 PM, that he had a general curfew, and that of course, he had long since been banned from owning his own car.
Klemperer was always circumspect in recounting these laws he labored under to his "Semitophile" acquaintances. (That's an awkward translation of the German phrase Klemperer probably used to refer to Aryans who were sympathetic to Jews. But it is perhaps the only word that was available to Martin Chalmers, who otherwise has produced a generally fluid translation of Klemperer's journals.) At any rate, Klemperer was careful never to appear too whining or too critical of the restrictions placed on him. He didn't want to alienate these Aryan allies. Nevertheless, he repeatedly found himself in the position of having to enlighten them about the government's latest round of restrictions. And his listeners were almost always genuinely surprised to hear about these laws. Their ignorance in the face of all the anti-Semitic propaganda blared daily from radios, blazoned from the newspapers, seemed to be more a function of people's tendency towards plodding self-preoccupation than an indication of any active complicity with the advancing evil.
I think you'll find that Klemperer's account also carries a very relevant warning to us in our current pursuit of terrorists at all costs. Klemperer survived the early rounds of call-ups for the concentration camps because he was a decorated World War I hero, and because he was married to an Aryan. For these reasons, he was given some initial grudging dispensation from the worst Nazi reprisals. However as the War progressed, his past service to Germany and his Aryan affiliation came to count for less and less. Finally his number was up and he, along with the last handful of Jews remaining around Dresden, were scheduled for transport. The only thing that saved him was the Allied bombing of Dresden. Most local Nazi records were destroyed in this notorious bombardment. So Klemperer and his wife, having survived the bombing, were also able to survive those last most brutal months of the Nazi regime by assuming new identities and wandering through the German countryside from town to town, passing themselves off as a typical displaced Aryan couple. If the Nazis' meticulous records (documenting family lineages and confirming who was where) had remained intact, Klemperer would certainly have been deported to the gas chambers.
So if you don't already have doubts about the increasing surveillance measures being taken in the U.S., presumably to guard against terrorists and other "evildoers" - reading these journals will give you pause. One of the lessons of Klemperer's journal is how tyranny proceeds by little increments of paperwork. Its power is in keeping tabs.
Klemperer risked his life to write the entries in these journals, because it eventually became a capital crime for a Jew to possess paper or any pen/pencil. So it feels almost sacrilegious to make any criticism of this supremely brave and literate account. However I do have one small criticism. And that is Klemperer's common masculine tendency to put his wife in the background of his life. Eva Klemperer comes off in the diary as a shadowy adjunct to the importance of Victor's work producing these pages.
She is mentioned, more frequently in the first volume of the diaries, but this mention is usually limited to reports of the fact that she had another hysterical fit that day, or that she engaged Victor in another round of angry lamentation, or that she suffered some physical malady. He does acknowledge her collaborative bravery. She also risked her life every time she smuggled the pages of his work out of their small assigned apartment into the hands of friends for safekeeping. But we never directly hear Eva's voice in all this. The reader is only left to guess at the actual substance of her outbursts.
You will probably feel impelled to read between the lines to flesh her out. Perhaps Eva wasn't the prettiest girl in school, so she took the one marriage proposal that came her way. She married the intellectually accomplished Victor. Victor was available because Aryan prejudice, even in those early years, already limited him socially. We can imagine her outbursts of recrimination as the Nazi noose grew tighter around their yoked necks. Why did you have to be Jewish? Why have you dragged me down with you? I could have led such a happy life. And instead, look at me - scrounging for rotten potatoes, under constant threat of beatings and death - and all because of you!
If only Eva had written her own diary, we might have had some additional fascinating insights into why and how a couple stays together under such trying circumstances. We might have gained a greater understanding of the ties of love and the chains of having nowhere else to go. As it is, we have only Victor's side of the story. But that is a powerful, must-read insight into how tyranny grows, brick-by-brick, petty edict by petty edict.
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The most compelling book I have ever read
Rating (5)
Date: 2006-03-21
9 out of 9 customers found this reveiw helpful
Because my friends all know what a book-hound I am, people often ask me what my all-time favorite book is. Admittedly the answer to this would change over time, but, at present, "I Will Bear Witness" is the one that first pops into my mind.
I found this very personal account of the days and nights of a German Jewish man--an inoffensive and formerly rather conservative German nationalist academic married to a Gentile--during the Nazi terror regime to be absolutely breathtaking. Indeed, I was so caught up in his account that I took an unexpected day of vacation from work just to not interrupt my reading once I had started.
Further, I found myself sprawled on my bed, as is sometimes customary with me, surrounded by ancillary books, atlases, and maps --a behavior that signifies I'm reading a book that has utterly gripped me and a book that is expanding my horizons.
Klemperer was (just barely) saved from being sent to a concentration camp due to his marriage to a non-Jew. However, he lived every day under the threat of torture and deportation to a camp and his journal tells of the years of grinding anxiety over his fate and the fate of his wife, friends, and relatives-many of whom were taken. It also speaks to the minutiae of life under the Nazi's--such things as their penchant for legalisms to justify their treatment of the Jews embodied in his incessant embroilment in Nazi demands that he take part in the legalisms of their confiscation of his property. Moreover, as the war draws to a close, he draws a stunning portrait of life as a war refugee--a picture that applies to war refugees the world over throughout time.
Kudos to those who elevated this book to number one among the history choices-it deserves it and in my mind deserves even more.
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Life-Affirming, Edge-of-your-seat, Nonstop Reading
Rating (5)
Date: 2006-01-30
8 out of 8 customers found this reveiw helpful
Victor Klemperer's diary of the years of the Hitler dictatorship and his recording of the day-to-day lives of the Jews of Dresden, his thoughtful and insightful commentary on the methods (particularly the language of the propaganda) of the Third Reich, the heart-wrenching stories of those who were taken away never to be seen again, his experience in the firebombing of Dresden in 1945 and his miraculous journey home should be required reading for everyone about the horrors of tyranny and war. It is also a tribute to the true human spirit and the power of the intellect. Klemperer never lost his determination to live, despite all the blows of terror that were aimed at him, his family, and his friends. That he believed there was something to live for--in the midst of utter barbarity--should inspire all of us to work for a better world. It did me.
A remarkable record of a dark time. Reading it gives one the courage to carry on in the dark times that have come again.
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