I Shall Bear Witness

Victor Klemperer

What a wonderful set of diaries. The title of volume one is I Shall Bear Witness and volume two is To The Bitter End. Stitch the titles together and you get what Victor Klemperer was about in the nazi years. A German Jew, in his sixties, an eminent professor at Dresden university, a secret diarist.

Not a brave man, physically, and even something of a moaner. It's a diary that is filled with humdrum concerns and petty disputes with friends and family. But a brave man intellectually and brave to secretly document the nazi period so carefully in all its casual brutality and hysterical lawlessness. And most of all, brave and strong in his belief that the nazis are an aberration. He answers the question that is always hanging in the air when we think about the German Jews. They knew what was coming, why didn't they get out while they could? His answer is profound and dignified - he is German to the core, a huge believer in German culture and civilisation. It is not he that is unGerman but the nazis themselves.

It's the intimacy of the document which makes it so moving. It's easy enough, in history books, to learn of how the nazis' legislative programme slowly imposed humiliation and privation on the Jewish population. The removals of Jews from academic and civil service posts, the ban on using public libraries, the confiscation of private property, cars, typewriters. Even the ban on owning pets. But seen through the eyes of Klemperer this stuff becomes not just a historical horror but personal and baffling.

Diaries are an especially poignant format because we know how much worse (and better) it will eventually get for Klemperer. There are many entries throughout the 1930s with Klemperer pondering Hitler's future - surely he cannot last past winter, a banking friend says the economy is about to collapse, there is a rumour the army are to remove the nazis the following week. For a fleeting moment, like Klemperer, we want to believe it. In other entries, more rarely, he notes with despair that, though an end to nazism in Germany must come, he will probably not live to see it. In fact, we know from the introduction, he and his wife survive the war and even prosper in the new East Germany.

556 pages. I've been reading bits out to people. Much of it has filled me with despair. On now, with a heavy heart, to volume two and the "Bitter End".