If you have not read the two volumes of Victor Klemperer’s journals entitled I Will Bear Witness, then I highly recommend you do so. They are dense, some parts of them are very difficult, (and the typeface, in my opinion, is way too small) — but man, is it a worthwhile experience. The journals are incredibly detailed first-hand accounts of the rise of the Nazi regime, written by a Jewish man, an intellectual, who was married to a German woman. A Christian.
As the noose tightened, as their options dwindled, as their freedoms were slowly but surely taken from them … he kept to his self-assigned task: that he would bear witness.
He somehow, somehow, maintained a cold analytical eye (for the most part). He does not put his head in the sand. He analyzes the newspapers, the language of the Nazis … he documents how the Nazis hijacked language, taking over words like power and honor and work and father … and twisted them, made them agents of evil. To me, that is the best part of the book. His deconstruction of the Nazi language.
