Klemperer - A Diary of the Nazi Years: 1942-1945

Richer and more profoundly disturbing than Anne Franks journals.

Time

To read his almost day-by-day account is a hypnotic experience; the whole, hard to put down, is a true murder mysteryfrom the perspective of the victim. Klemperer [writes] with a vivid power that is, and I think will remain, unsurpassed.

P ETER G AY , The New York Times

Few readers will fail to be moved, as I wasultimately to the point of tears.

N IALL F ERGUSON , The Sunday Telegraph

Has the immediacy and poignancy of unedited notes written in the thick of experience. Extraordinary. One of the shrewdest and most meticulous observers of life under the Nazi regime.

The New Republic

This is history rawfull of shrewd observations on the nature of the Nazi regime and the quality of the response of the German people. An extraordinary and important event.

The New York Times

This is color film of Nazi Germany after years of black and white. Klemperers diary deserves to rank alongside that of Anne Frank. It is certain to become not only the main primary source for historians of the Nazi period, but also an essential read for anyone who wishes to understand what it was like to be a Jew living in Germany in the 1930s.

P HILIP K ERR , The Sunday Times (London)

Exceptional. Klemperers uniquely vivid voice deserves to be heard in the current debates surrounding Daniel Jonah Goldhagens wholesale indictment of ordinary Germans.

The Times Literary Supplement

The best written, most evocative, most observant record of daily life in the Third Reich.

A MOS E LON , The New York Times Magazine

The most extraordinary German witness of Nazism that has yet come to lightKlempererdemonstrates that reason is not only a quality of mindin his case a deeply moral perceptionbut also a cultural tradition of enormous value.

V ERLYN K LINKENBORG , The New York Times

1999 Modern Library Paperback Edition

Translation, preface, and notes copyright 1998 by Martin Chalmers

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Modern Library and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This translation was originally published in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, and in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1998.

First published in Germany under the title Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten: Tagebcher 19331945 von Victor Klemperer. Copyright Aufbau-Verlag GmbH, Berlin, 1995.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Klemperer, Victor.

[Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten. English]

I will bear witness: the diaries of Victor Klemperer.

p. cm.

Contents: [1]. 19331941.

ISBN 0-375-75378-8 [1]

1. Klemperer, Victor, 18811960Diaries.

2. French teachersGermanyDiaries. 3. PhilologistsGermanyDiaries. 4. GermanyHistory19331945Sources. I. Title.

PC2064.K5A31998

943.086092dc21

[B]9815429

eBook ISBN9780399589072

Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com

eBook design adapted from printed book design Mercedes Everett

Frontispiece photograph of Victor Klemperer by Eva Kemlein, Berlin.

Photograph on Aufbau-Verlag GmbH.

v4.1

a

I shall go on writing. That is my heroism.

I will bear witness, precise witness!

May 27, 1942

Eva and Victor Klemperer, c. 1940.