He resented his professional marginalization deeply, rightly suspecting that anti-Semitism was partly to blame for his failure to advance. Yet his belief in the superiority of German culture remained undiminished; he envied rival scholars like Erich Auerbach, who with Vossler’s help had escaped persecution by finding a niche in Istanbul. Until 1933, and even for some time afterward, Klemperer still identified unconditionally with the German nation, and had nothing but contempt for Jews who disowned Germany, going so far in his diary (in a 1934 entry) to compare Zionists, with “their nosing after blood, their ancient ‘cultural roots,’” to Nazis. be taken up once again. The so-called German-Jewish symbiosis had not necessarily been a tragicomic self-delusion, as Gershom Scholem and many others had claimed. Nor was it necessarily one-sided. The tragedy had not been inevitable. of the Jewish experience in Germany with a "mouthful of self-congratulations" and the evocation of an "obscenely harmonized German-Jewish culture." I heard a piece of Hitler's speech in Konsigsberg. I understood only a few words. But the tone! The unctuous roaring bark, the bark, really, of a clergyman. . . . How long will I be able to retain my professorship?

After reunification, more and more people said that Germany must adopt a new "national agenda." Rich, powerful and located in the heart of Europe, the country could no longer hide behind the skirts of the United States. Germany was said to have March 17, 1933 . . . on Friday, unfortunately, Thiemes was here. It was frightful . . . such enthusiastic conviction and support. The phraseology of unity. Progress piously repeated. Grete (his wife) said, "Everything else failed, now we have to it: I am German. The others are not. I must hold on to it. The spirit decides, not the blood. I must hold on to it: Zionism on my part would have been a comedy which baptism was not." The fact that Klemperer -- in his extreme state of segregation and isolation -- knew as early as March 1942 of the existence of the death camps at Auschwitz and wrote about it in his diary was heralded by one reviewer as yet another proof

Indeed, in a literary century rife with reappraisals, few 20th-century writers rode a wilder wave to prominence than did Klemperer. Born to Jewish parents on October 9, 1881 in Landsberg an der Warthe—then part of Prussia, now Gorzów, Poland—he married a Lutheran in 1906 and converted to Protestantism in 1912. These events combined to protect him throughout World War II—barely. During the conflict, Klemperer frequently and narrowly avoided deportation, a miraculous turn that culminated with his survival of the infamous Dresden bombings of February 1945. LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen (1947) is a book by Victor Klemperer, Professor of Literature at the Dresden University of Technology. The title, half in Latin and half in German, translates to " The Language of the Third Reich: A Philologist's Notebook"; the book is published in English translation as The Language of the Third Reich.

This extraordinary appeal to Germans is not hard to understand. The Nazi tyranny has been thoroughly explored in general histories, monographs, memoirs, lectures, films, exhibitions, television programs. But even the reader familiar with Holocaust material After reading the diaries, Walser hailed Klemperer as the "ideal human figure in the German memory-conflict." Klemperer had proudly "upheld his Deutschtum and Deutschsein during the 12 years of legalized Gestapo terror."Klemperer's own private attempt to hold the beast at bay by recording its acts and by exposing its corrupted language continued to the end, an undertaking as crazy, as courageous and as endearing as that of the little barber in Chaplin's "Great prelude.'' The day before that election, rigged by the Nazis with giant propaganda and intimidation, Klemperer had heard Hitler speak and wondered at his delivery: ''But the tone! The unctuous bawling, truly bawling, The complete edition of the diaries offers an even more comprehensive and detailed picture of the decades documented by Klemperer. fanatisch, Fanatismus ( Fanatical / Fanaticism; used in a particularly Orwellian way: strongly positively connoted for the "good" side, and strongly negatively connoted for the "bad" side)