To The Bitter End

Victor Klemperer

To The Bitter End takes the Klemperer story through to 1945 and the war's end. In some ways this volume is more of a conventional work of Holocaust literature. By 1942 (the start of this volume) Klemperer's life is in constant danger and his Jewish friends neighbours and colleagues are being picked off at leisure by the local Dresden Gestapo. The petty humiliations and privations of the 1930s detailed in the earlier volume have been replaced by something much worse, and in a way more familiar. Klemperer and his wife are rehoused several times by the authorities - on one occasion because their previously cramped accommodation has become more and more spacious - literally every other member of that Jewish household has been imprisoned or murdered or has committed suicide.

Klemperer becomes repetitive at this point, understandably. There are several references to the "you I shall eat last" episode in Odysseus, as he reflects that each time he is spared by the Gestapo it is merely a reprieve. There are countless occasions where he notes that such and such a transgression "could cost me my head". Usually the transgression is pifflingly small; to speak to an Aryan in the street, to mention (even factually) a German military setback, to have a newspaper in the house (even a nazi one). The most dangerous act of all: The keeping of the diary itself.

Overall it's a fascinating document. Several of the most interesting questions about this period in history are answered, some are left tantalisingly unanswered. As to how far the Jewish population (at least) knew what was going on there can be little doubt. Klemperer seems less well-informed than most, in that he had moved most of his life in German rather than Jewish circles. And yet he quickly picks up scraps of information here and there. Early on in this volume "a most awful camp", is mentioned, Auschwitz "where they work you to death within a few days".

More interesting, in a way, is what Klemperer has to tell us about the Germans themselves. He carefully notes the whispered words of comfort as well as the insults hissed in the street. They seem to balance out. As to how much ordinary Germans knew about what was going on, Klemperer is as uncertain as we are, 50 years later. At one point a sympathetic Aryan German simply advises him "I wouldn't bother" to wear the large yellow star, the source of so much stigma and anguish. Klemperer is astonished to discover she doesn't realise this kind of daring subterfuge could instantly cost him his life. And days after the war's end he meets, in rural Germany, a woman who has never heard of the Gestapo, or at least claims not to have. How much this is "willful forgetting" and how much it is mere ignorance, Klemperer is unable to say.