Daily Book Excerpt: Memoirs:
Next book on the Memoir/Letters/Journals shelf is I Will Bear Witness 1942-1945: A Diary of the Nazi Years
Volume II of Victor Klemperer’s extraordinary journal (volume I here). The screws tighten inexorably, and with each step, the Klemperers feel that this, this, is the nadir. Their friends are rounded up and taken away. Some of their friends flee to Israel (Klemperer has very strong feelings about Zionists). His identity is German, and while “German” had come to mean something monstrous (and that is what is so heartbreaking for him), he refuses to believe that the German nation is lost. The Nazis are an aberration, NOT an accurate representation of what it means to be German. So Klemperer has mixed feelings about a lot of things, and besides: he’s an elderly man. Just picking up and moving to another nation is not to be taken lightly. Eventually, though, it is too late to even consider that. There is no way out. Klemperer has lots of run-ins with the Gestapo, is imprisoned briefly, and all of his privileges as a Professor (and citizen) are removed. He can’t use the library. He can’t meet with friends. If I recall correctly, the Jews meet up in a Jewish graveyard, to sit and share news and commiserate. But they risk their lives gathering together. The Klemperers are moved from their house (with the promise that they will “get it back”), and moved in with other people. The harassment is constant, the fear omnipresent. Klemperer’s journal, in and of itself, is a risky act. If it were found, the consequences would be horrific. But I suppose Klemperer, as things got so bad, didn’t care anymore. What more could they do to him? His journal was hidden away in friends’ houses, he had piles of paper in basements, etc. – and the fact that it all was found (especially considering the fact that Dresden basically burned to the ground) is extraordinary. Even with all of the hardship, Klemperer keeps reminding himself in his diary, “I will bear witness. I will bear precise witness!”
THAT is his heroism. Often he comes off as querulous, and a little bit annoying. He is an obsessive. His back hurts, his eye hurts, his leg hurts … etc. He’s an old man in a terrible situation and no mercy is being shown him. (Well, SOME mercy. Due to his marriage to a Germany Christian woman, he was spared the concentration camp – although eventually that might have gotten him as well. But initially, he was spared.) But where he is truly heroic is in his insistence to continue bearing witness to what was happening in his country, despite the fact that his health was not good, his wife’s health was not good, they had lost their home, they lost everything … but still: every day he sat down and wrote what he observed. This is, in many ways, NOT a personal journal. What makes it unique is its observation of the culture, and what was being done to the German language. Klemperer keeps extensive notes. The press was so censored by that point that one had to become adept at reading through the lines, and often what was said was the exact opposite of what had happened. I mean, we know this if we know our history. Germany declared it felt threatened by Poland so it attacked them in self-defense. Germany was always declaring it felt threatened, when THEY were the main threat. White is black and black is white. Orwell knew what he was about. Say it enough times and people will swallow anything. Klemperer often seems like he is squinting at the newspaper – trying to SEE what was actually going on behind the bombastic generic Nazi prose … and then turns to his journal and takes down notes on his analysis of what is being done to the language.
Eyewitness accounts are great, don’t get me wrong – but this if far more than an eyewitness account. This is a scholarly work of analysis. Scribbled on scraps of paper and hidden away in other people’s houses … to be recovered after the war. Extraordinary.
I wanted to find an entry that really shows Klemperer at work, so here’s one from 1942. When he refers to “LTI”, he is referring to his “Language of the Third Reich” project.
Excerpt from I Will Bear Witness 1942-1945: A Diary of the Nazi Years
April 28, Tuesday
Hitler’s Reichstag speech on Sunday, April 26. Going by that, it is no longer five minutes to twelve but 11:59. He talks about how close catastrophe was last winter. He says he is better prepared for the next one. So when will it end? He says the outcome will be decided in the East. But what about England? But what about the USA? Incomparably more important: He says he has only rarely had to resort to “harsh” measures, where obedience broke down. (So it has broken down!) Most important of all: He demands the right to be allowed to get rid of officers, civil servants, judges, instantaneously, without due process. Very important here the expressions: “sentenced to be cashiered” or “remove from office and position” “without regard for ‘duly acquired rights'” (three times, afterward once again used by Goering). Cashiering > officers, “duly acquired rights” are very old terms from the civil service code. — It’s mad, it’s tyranny outdoing itself, it reflects the utmost insecurity, if someone already long-invested with all dictatorial powers once again demands what he already possesses; if a sultan expressly declares that he himself with directly intervene in the justice dispensed by his judges, if they practice merely “formal law”. Linguistically amusing once again the relationship to numbers. “Napoleon had to cope with 19 degrees of frost, I had to cope with minus 50 degrees and once with 60 degrees. Even my winters are twice as grand as other people’s winters! And yet I am still victorious.” Still on numbers: the worst winter for 140 years. — The concentration of hate has this time turned into utter madness. Not England or the USA or Russia — only, in everything nothing but the Jew. — Pay attention to the mixture of hide-and-seek and open threat. 11:59, but shall we live to see the end of the day? It has by now become a firm rule: On the day after a house search there are suicides. We heard of the new case at the same time as the Hitler speech. A couple called Feuerstein, living in Altenzeller Strasse, had been pillaged, then summoned to the Gestapo and beaten and kicked there; during the night the people were found dead in their gas-filled kitchen. — From day to day I wait for the house search to take place here. The apprehension is always worst in the evening between seven and nine. No doubt wrongly, for the squads are said to appear at any time of day. They are said to steal everything: even food that has been bought on coupons, writing paper, postage stamps, leather briefcases. They are said to drink up skimmed milk, etc.
I am reading Arthur Eloesser, Von Ghetto nach Europa [From the ghetto of Europe]. The effect of LTI on the Jews is worth a chapter on its own. But to what extent will my language history be only “camouflaged” intellectual history? No, I must always hold on to this: in lingua veritas. Veritas is part of intellectual history; lingua provides a general confirmation of the relevant facts. […]
Toward evening
Do Hitler’s speeches still have an effect after all? An older worker (older and worker in all probability!) called to me from his bicycle: “You damned Jew!” Something like that makes me unsure that it really is 11:59.
A German Jew, no matter of which profession, can write nothing today without placing German-Jewish relations at the center. But must he, for that reason, capitulate before National Socialist views, and must he adopt the language of the National Socialists? Arthur Eloesser, once the openminded and German theater critic of the Vossische Zeitung, does both without reservation.
I see what you mean. Through observation Klemperer reached the same conclusion as Orwell (and some 5 years earlier) that discourse is carried out on the ground chosen by those who control language. The Nazis, prompted by their intellectual ancestors, declared and repeated ad nauseam that there was a Jewish ‘problem’ and in doing so they created one. With that done, their final solution became comprehensible to otherwise decent people. Language controls reality, which is a very scary thought.
Fascinating stuff. My copy of LTI will be with me in one to two working days. Thanks for the tip.
Oh, I’m so psyched you’re gonna check out LTI – let me know what you think! It’s not quite up to the level of Orwell (but then again, what is) – but it’s a very focused look at one particular group (the Nazis) and their management of language. Chilling. He even reads obituaries and analyzes the language there – he leaves no stone unturned.
What you wrote about German Jews not leaving Germany reminded me of something my father told me once. I’m paraphrasing but my grandfather, who was a rabbi, had said something to the effect that Hitler and the Nazis could not be possible in the country of Goethe and Schiller. My father seemed to be more prescient, and once tried unsuccessfully to bicycle his way to Africa as a young teenager. As luck would have it, when Jewish children were being sponsored out of Germany, he found himself on a farm in Indiana.
Sheila, I guess I have a book report to do over Easter!
Yeah, a little light reading. haha