Victor Klemperer
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| Victor Klemperer | |
|---|---|
| Born | 9 October 1881 Landsberg an der Warthe, Brandenburg, Prussia, Germany, today Gorzów Wielkopolski, Poland |
| Died | 11 February 1960 Dresden, East Germany |
| Occupation | Professor |
| Spouse | Eva Klemperer née Schlemmer (1906–1951) Hadwig Klemperer née Kirchner (1952–) |
| Parents | Wilhelm Klemperer Henriette Klemperer née Franke |
Victor Klemperer (9 October 1881–11 February 1960) was a businessman, journalist and eventually a Professor of Literature, specialising in the French Enlightenment at the Technical College of Dresden (now Technische Universität Dresden). His diaries detailing his life in Nazi Germany were published in 1995.
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[edit] Early Life
Klemperer was born into a Jewish family. His father was a rabbi, cousin to the famous conductor Otto Klemperer and brother to the surgeon Georg Klemperer, who was a personal physician to Lenin.
Victor Klemperer attended several gymnasiums. He was a student of philosophy, Romance and German studies at universities in Munich, Geneva, Paris and Berlin from 1902 to 1905 and later worked as a journalist and writer in Berlin until he continued his studies in Munich from 1912. He completed his doctorate in 1913 and was habilitated under the supervision of Karl Vossler in 1914. From 1914 to 1915, Klemperer lectured in Naples, after which he became a decorated military volunteer of World War I.
[edit] In Nazi Germany
Notwithstanding his conversion to Protestantism in 1912, Klemperer's life started to worsen considerably after the Nazi rise to power in 1933.
He kept a diary, which from 1933 through the end of the war, provides a unique day-to-day account of life under tyranny and the struggle for survival among Jews in the Third Reich. This diary also brilliantly details the Nazis' perversion of the German language for propaganda purposes, which Klemperer would use as the basis for his later book LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii.
From 1935, under the Nuremberg Laws of Citizenship and Race, Klemperer was stripped of his academic title, job, citizenship and freedom and eventually forced to work in a factory and as a day laborer. Since his wife, Eva, was "Aryan", Klemperer dodged deportation for most of the war, but was rehoused under miserable conditions in a ghetto (Judenhaus), where he was routinely questioned, mistreated and humiliated by the Gestapo.
[edit] Flight
On 13 February 1945 he assisted in delivering notices of deportation to some of the last remaining members of the Jewish community in Dresden. Fearful that he too would soon be sent to his death he used the confusion created by Allied bombings that night to remove his yellow star, join a refugee column, and escape into American-controlled territory. He and his wife survived and Klemperer's diary narrates their return (largely on foot through Bavaria and Eastern Germany) to their house in Dölzschen, on the outskirts of Dresden. They managed to reclaim the house, which had been "aryanised" under the Nazis.
[edit] Post-war
Klemperer went on to become a significant post-war cultural figure in East Germany, lecturing at the universities of Greifswald, Berlin and Halle. He became a delegate of the Cultural Union in the GDR Parliament (Volkskammer) in 1950.
Klemperer's diary was published from 1995 as Tagebücher (Berlin, Aufbau). It was an immediate literary sensation and rapidly became a bestseller in Germany. An English translation has appeared in three volumes: I Will Bear Witness (1933 to 1941), To The Bitter End (1942 to 1945) and The Lesser Evil (1945 to 1959).
[edit] Documentary
In 2003, Stan Neumann directed a documentary based on Klemperer's diaries, "La langue ne ment pas" (Language does not lie), which considers the importance of Klemperer’s observations and the role of the witness in such situations, and reflects on how we must vigilantly observe how those in power manipulate language.
[edit] References
- Early life: Victor Klemperer at the Aufbau-Verlag website (German)
- Spouses: Victor Klemperer: Biographisches (German)
- Bartov, Omer, "The Last German", in The New Republic, 1998-12-28, p. 34+ (scholarly overview of the Klemperer diaries by a professor at Brown University)
[edit] External links
- The everyday life of tyranny
- Ms Susie Ehrmann. The Diaries of Victor Klemperer
- "Surviving the Firestorm" (Excerpt from Klemperer's diary describing the bombing of Dresden)
- Large sequence of excerpts from Klemperer's diaries
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Klemperer, Victor |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | Philologist, author of LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1881-10-09 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Landsberg an der Warthe, Germany = Gorzów Wielkopolski, Poland |
| DATE OF DEATH | 1960-02-11 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | Dresden, Germany |
