I Shall Bear Witness: The Diaries Of Victor Klemperer 1933-41

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That this moral cowardice has not altogether disappeared from mainstream German opinion today is, finally, the lesson implicit in the reception of the Klemperer diaries. In effect, Klemperer has been made to say what most Germans want him to say: namely, that, during the war years, they, just like every other nation, were a “normal” mixture of good and evil. This interpretation is even shared by some older historians in the United States. Thus, Fritz Stern has recommended Klemperer as a balance to Goldhagen, and especially as one whose more “nuanced picture” includes the Germans’“moments of decency and quiet help.” Similarly, István Deák, writing in the New Republic, asserts that the diaries show how “in Dresden . . . ‘ordinary’ Germans tended to behave decently toward the frail, bent, old professor. . . . Unlike the minority of radical anti-Semites, the majority of Europeans did not want all the Jews to disappear from their midst; they wanted only that there should be fewer Jews.” Victor Klemperer attended several gymnasia. He was a student of philosophy, Romance and German studies at universities in Munich, Geneva, Paris and Berlin from 1902 to 1905, and later worked as a journalist and writer in Berlin, until he resumed his studies in Munich from 1912.

Walser’s remarks dovetailed with the turn-of-the-millennium wish of the left-wing government of Chancellor Gerhard Schroder to banish unwelcome and inconvenient memories. Of Goldhagen’s book, Schroder had this to say: “I haven’t read it; but I don’t believe it makes sense to claim that all Germany not only knew of the murder of the Jews, but also wanted it.” In Schröder’s case—his father was killed on the Russian front—filial piety may explain this reluctance to confront the guilt of ordinary Germans. But what a German politician, especially a left-wing one, also knows is that saying he has not read Goldhagen is something public opinion will largely approve of.it: I am German. The others are not. I must hold on to it. The spirit decides, not the blood. I must hold on to it: Zionism on my part would have been a comedy which baptism was not." the award ceremony. This could not have been accidental. He devoted nearly his entire speech to the proposition that the memory of Auschwitz must not be allowed to destroy the possibility of renewed Jewish assimilation within German nationhood People in their daily routine, preoccupied with problems and goals, rarely stop for a moment to ask the question "Why?" They accept the world as it is and do not ask why is it as it is. "Why?" is a difficult question that not always has an easy answer. It requires awareness not only of the wondrous, but of what is moral and good. We sometimes consciously avoid this question. It often endangers our survival, because it opens the doors for the general truths and personal motives . Usually "Why?" is victim's question. People with "normal" lives do not like it. It makes them insecure, rebellious, lonely...

On Tuesday at the new Universum cinema on Prager Strasse. Beside me a soldier of the Reichswehr, a mere boy, and his not very attractive girl. It was the evening before the boycott announcement. Conversation during an Alsberg advertisement. He: "One really shouldn't go to a Jew to shop." She: "But it's so terribly cheap." He: "Then it's bad and doesn't last." She, reflective, quite matter-of-fact, without the least pathos: "No, really, it's just as good and lasts just as long, really just like in Christian shops—and so much cheaper." He falls silent. When Hitler, Hindenburg, etc. appeared, he clapped enthusiastically. Later, during the utterly American jazz band film, clearly with a touch of Yiddish at points, he clapped even more enthusiastically. apartment. They must kill their cat, for Jews are not allowed to keep pets. Klemperer cannot buy flowers, books, tobacco, newspapers or shaving cream ("Jews are supposed to grow beards"). He is pressed into forced labor; he shovelsbeen an alliance of "grand capitalists" and "grand militarists" working together to suppress the "working class." From Klemperer's diaries, Nazism emerges as a movement of dour, petit-bourgeois Archie Like many completely assimilated Jews in Wilhelminian and Weimar Germany, he believed that Germans were, as he put it, a "chosen people," culturally and politically superior to others. "I still feel more shame than fear," he wrote