Victor Klemperer

Origins and early life

Victor Klemperer was born on 9 October 1881 at Landsberg an der Warthe, the ninth child of Wilhelm Klemperer, a Reform rabbi, and he was a cousin of the conductor Otto Klemperer.

Work and career

This fiche states plainly that he left Judaism: he was baptised a Protestant in 1912, after an earlier attempt in 1903 followed by a return to Judaism, and he thought of himself as a German first and last. The Nuremberg laws of 1935 classified him as a Jew regardless of his baptism, and that contradiction is the substance of his work. Wounded as a volunteer in the First World War, he became professor of Romance literature at the Technical University of Dresden, and was dismissed in 1935; he survived the war only because his wife Eva Schlemmer was not Jewish, a marriage that spared him deportation until the Dresden firestorm of February 1945 destroyed the records and let him tear off his star and flee.

Throughout those years he kept a diary in secret, hidden by a friend, recording each humiliation, each new regulation, each rumour, and it was published in 1995 as I Shall Bear Witness, becoming the fullest daily record of Jewish life under the Third Reich. From the same notes he wrote LTI, Lingua Tertii Imperii, published in 1947, an analysis of how Nazism worked by corrupting ordinary German words, a book still read as a founding text on the language of totalitarian power. He stayed in East Germany after the war, rejoined a university and died at Dresden on 11 February 1960.