The feeling stronger every day for weeks now, it cannot go on like this much longer. And yet it does go on and on.
*
When the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933, Victor Klemperer was a professor of Romance Languages at the Technical University of Dresden. Born in 1881 to a Jewish family, he converted to Christianity, married an Aryan woman, and served in the German Army in World War I. He considered himself fully and completely German in every way. Didn't matter. According to the Nuremberg Laws he was Jewish, and now a state subject with no citizenship rights.
March 30, Thursday (1933)
In fact I feel shame more than fear, shame for Germany. I have truly always felt German. I have always imagined: The twentieth century and Mitteleuropa was different from the fourteenth century and Romania. Mistake.
*
March 30, Thursday (1933)
In fact I feel shame more than fear, shame for Germany. I have truly always felt German. I have always imagined: The twentieth century and Mitteleuropa was different from the fourteenth century and Romania. Mistake.
*
Klemperer (first cousin of the conductor Otto Klemperer) was a writer and a diarist, and his journals were published in 1995. The ones covering the Nazi years are now standard primary sources for historians researching daily life in the Third Reich. In the first volume, which covers the years 1935-1941, Klemperer recounts in excruciating detail the incremental erosion of his way of life: the loss of his job and the drastic reduction of his pension, the confiscation of his house and the move to the Dresden ghetto, the loss of his car and his phone, the loss of Jewish friends to emigration, deportation, jail, and suicide and gentile friends to fear of association, the loss of his freedom of movement, even the loss of his typewriter. The curfews. The stores where he can no longer shop. The doctors he can no longer see. The ration coupons. The taunts on the streets. The ever increasing restrictions, indignities, and humiliations. The tightening of the noose around his neck.
*
June 13, Wednesday (1934)
And on every side consistent reports about the tremendous lack of money. ...In addition, the constant rumors of war. Everywhere uncertainty, ferment, secrets. We live from day to day.
*
The two volume set of Klemperer's diaries has sat unread on my shelf for at least ten years, probably more like fifteen. I bought them used ($6.00 each) at book sale. Two reasons compelled me to pick Volume One up a few weeks ago: 1) I'm working on a project involving a diary from the year 1926 that my grandmother kept when she was 17 and I wanted to read a diary, and 2) the coronavirus. What's it like to live through a time of uncertainty, fear, and societal disruption? I thought, maybe a little perspective will help. I mean, what we're living through now can't possibly be worse than living through the rise of the Third Reich.
December 2 (1935)
Today it occurred to me: Never has the tension between human power and powerlessness, human knowledge and human stupidity been so overwhelmingly great as now.
*
December 2 (1935)
Today it occurred to me: Never has the tension between human power and powerlessness, human knowledge and human stupidity been so overwhelmingly great as now.
*
Reading Klemperer's diary is like watching the replay of a train wreck, but in slow motion. It's painful to read because he's recording in real time what we already know has happened, and speculating on what we already know will happen. (Although he has reasons for staying in Germany, I frequently found myself yelling at him, "Get out! Now!") He debates emigrating, but by the time he decides to leave it's too late. The conversations he has with his friends and acquaintances, especially in those first years of the Third Reich, are heartbreaking. They alternately look for any reason to feel optimistic (he tries tracking popular sentiment by keeping count of how many people greet each other with "Heil Hitler" and/or the Sieg Heil salute vs. how many with just "good morning" or "good day") and then descend into depression and fatalism. They remind me of the conversations we've had, and are still having today, about the uncertainty of our future. And I find myself thinking: What will someone in the future reading a diary that details what's going on now think? That we were naive? Brave? Smart? Doomed? Delusional? Will they be yelling at us? Will they be proud of what we did or ashamed and embarrassed? Are we headed for a train wreck and we just don't know it? Or have we averted disaster in time?
*
September 11, Sunday (1938)
If I talk to the butcher or the butter man here in Dresden, then there will certainly be peace, but if (as the day before yesterday) I listen to Wolf, the car man, then, "Things are coming to a head now!" If I read the newspaper, see and hear the film reports, then we're doing sooo well, we love the Fuhrer soo much and sooo unanimously---what is real, what is happening? That's how one experiences history. We know even less about today than about yesterday and no more than about tomorrow.
*
Although I've yet to start Volume Two, I know what happens to Klemperer. Two of only a handful left in the Dresden ghetto, he and his wife Eva flee the city during the Allied firebombing in February, 1945. They join a refugee column and escape to American controlled territory. He remains in what becomes East Germany, and continues his career as a respected and honored academic until his death in 1960. He was one of the very few who made it through the inferno. Europe, and the world, changed forever.
What about us? Most immediately, how many of us won't make it? How many will be permanently scarred? What will the economic consequences be? And: How does it end? How do we know when it's over? What will our world be like after? What will we have learned about ourselves? What about next time?
A few weeks ago my daughter asked if this was going to be in the history books.
"It's going to be its own chapter!" I told her. "You're going to be telling your grandchildren about this."
A few weeks ago my daughter asked if this was going to be in the history books.
"It's going to be its own chapter!" I told her. "You're going to be telling your grandchildren about this."
*
July 9, toward evening (1941)
Perhaps, probably, it is the greatest good fortune to experience so much world history. But shall we survive it?
September 18 (1941), Thursday evening
*
I thought I knew a lot about this history. Most Jews grow up learning about what happened in Germany when the Nazis took over. Turns out there was a lot of stuff I didn't know. Little details. Like you weren't allowed to own pets. (Klemperer goes to a vet to have their tomcat Muschel euthanized.) Like when you were relocated to the ghetto and your house was turned over to someone else, you still had to pay the property taxes as well as for repairs and improvements. (The greengrocer is given Klemperer's house and he has to cover the cost of a new roof.) Like when the Nazis ordered you to wear the yellow star, when you went to pick it up you had to pay for it yourself.
*
September 18 (1941), Thursday evening
Today we were outside together in daylight for the last time.
*
May we all see daylight again soon.
 |
| Eva and Victor Klemperer, 1940. |