Comrade Klemperer: Communism, Liberalism, and Jewishness in the GDR: The Later Diaries, 1945–1959

Abstract

Although Victor Klemperer’s 1947 study of the wiles and distortions of Nazi language, LTI, Notizbuch eines Philologen (LTI for Lingua Tertii Imperii, the language of the Third Reich) achieved something of the status of an underground though largely unread classic,² it was only in the mid-1990s, with the publication of the diaries he kept during the Nazi period, that this scholar of French literature acquired broad-based fame within Western intellectual circles. The diaries constitute perhaps the most intricately detailed, sharply perceptive, and painfully wrought chronicles of everyday life in the Third Reich that we possess, at least from the viewpoint of its victims. The immense interest generated by the diaries was also, no doubt, spurred by the author’s prickly personality and the ideological conflicts he had to confront in the face of Nazism. They demonstrate how Klemperer, Wilhelmian son of a Reform rabbi, born 1881, convert to Protestantism, radical assimilationist, passionately committed to Deutschtum, opposed to all forms of Jewish particularism, and obsessively anti-Zionist, was faced with the collapse of his spiritual and intellectual worlds. The diaries register this process of decomposition and the valiant, if often hopelessly contradictory, attempts of this almost archetypically assimilatory Jew to somehow salvage and reconstitute them.³