V
ictor Klemperer, an academic philologist and student of French literature, is credited with having given us, in the two previously published volumes of his diaries, the most vivid portrait of the Hitler era, 1933-45. Though of Jewish heritage, he survived that time partly because of the indulgence shown to veterans of the First World War, and the successful political maneuverings of the non-Jewish wives of Jews. When this temporary reprieve was revoked, he was spared shipment to Auschwitz only by managing to escape with his wife in the confusion following the bombing of Dresden. His diaries, with their vivid depiction of the gradual tightening of political screws and changes in public opinion, are the longest and most detailed depiction of Nazism to appear in English. They are rivaled in insight, so far as this reviewer has managed to discover, only by two shorter works by persons also standing in an exceptional relationship to the regime, in their case as members of the minor aristocracy: Marie VassilnikovÂ’s Berlin Diaries (1998) and Friedrich Reck-MalleczewenÂ’s Diary of a Man in Despair (2000).
This third volume, on KlempererÂ’s fourteen years after the war as an academic and ornament of the East German Communist regime, may be even more valuable than its predecessors: its cinematographic equivalent is Marcel OphulÂ’s great film about collaboration in France, The Sorrow and the Pity (1971).
KlempererÂ’s book begins with a fleeting reference to the interregnum between the collapse of the Hitler regime and the consolidation of occupation, which resembled the utopian period of high political involvement and local initiative that Hannah Arendt found to be a stage in almost all revolutions, generally succeeded by lassitude, apathy, and the professionalization of politics.
At the end of the war, Klemperer found himself transformed within weeks from a hunted pariah into a man from whom recommendations and indulgences were sought, recognized by the Russian occupiers as a “Victim of Fascism.” From the outset, Klemperer feared that the privileges and positions accorded the few remaining Jews would lead to a revival of antisemitism. Of some thrusting fellow survivors, he observes, “Poor dears, adventurers, declasses, no harmless angels to be sure, but in many respects decent and open-hearted people.”
Klemperer saw in the Russian propaganda of the time an echo of “the language of the Third Reich” on which he had written a treatise while in captivity. When he chooses to join the Communist Party (KPD), having once called himself a democrat, he considers that “the KPD is needed.” “The Church so shamefully let me down,” he says. Seeking a position in the new society, he declares a desire “to make some contribution to the reconstruction of my Fatherland. . . . No matter what has happened to me, I do have no other.” In his application to join the party, he declares, “In my opinions and as a voter, I have stood by the liberals . . . without any alteration to this inclination. . . . Only a very resolute left-wing movement can get us out of this calamity and prevent its return. . . . Only in the KPD do I see the unambiguous will to do so.”
Klemperer believes that a complete purge of ex-Nazis is needed to prevent a recrudescence of the regime and of antisemitism. Recalling the failures of the Weimar regime, he reproaches the Communist Party for not “proceeding determinedly enough in [purging ex-