I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933–1941
VICTOR KLEMPERER
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48 reviews (1999) (368p)Visit this book's Amazon.com page >>
| Book Description |
March 10, 1933--"January 30: Hitler Chancellor. What, up to election, I called terror, was a mild prelude. On Saturday I heard a part of Hitler's speech from Königsberg. The front of a hotel at the railway station, illuminated, a torchlight procession. . . . I understood only occasional words. But the tone! The unctuous bawling, truly bawling, of a priest." Struggling to complete his ambitious history of eighteenth-century France, Victor Klemperer loses his professorship, then his car, his phone, his house, even his typewriter, under the ever-tightening Nazi grip. Not since the diary of Anne Frank has a secret journal burst onto the scene with such mesmerizing urgency. I Will Bear Witness is a testament of rare eloquence and humanity by the most astute witness ever to emerge from Hitler's Germany. It is a work of literature as well as a revelation of the day-by-day terror of the Nazi years. |
| Amazon.com Review |
| When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Victor Klemperer (1881-1960), honored as a frontline veteran of World War I, was a distinguished professor at the University of Dresden. A scant few months later he was merely a Jew, protected from deportation to a death camp only by his marriage to an Aryan. He suffered every other indignity to which German Jews were subjected, from losing his job to having his driver's license revoked to being denied permission to own a pet, and all are recorded with bitter clarity in his diary entries, which cover the years 1933 to 1941. (A second volume continuing through 1945 will be published in English in 1999.) The German edition of this book caused a sensation when it was published in 1995, and it's easy to see why: the relentless, quotidian nature of Nazi racism comes through forcefully in Klemperer's litany of daily humiliations and insults, a painful chronicle of situations in which readers can readily imagine themselves. Like Anne Frank, but with a more adult understanding of political fanaticism and human weakness, he makes the abstract horror of genocidal persecution very intimate, very personal, and very real. --Wendy Smith |
| Victor Klemperer Award Stats |
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| *Major Prize = Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, National Book Award, Man Booker Prize, and PEN/Faulkner Award |
