Links

Victor Klemperer

Introduction

Victor Klemperer (Landsberg (Prussia) 1881-1960), decorated veteran of World War I, businessman, journalist and eventually a Professor of Literature, specialising in the French Enlightenment at the Dresden University of Technology. He was the son of a rabbi, cousin to the famous conductor Otto Klemperer and brother to the surgeon Georg Klemperer, who was a personal physician to Lenin.

A converted Protestant of Jewish descent, Klemperer's life started to worsen considerably after the Nazi rise to power in 1933. Klemperer had long kept a diary, but from 1933 through the end of the war his work provides a unique day-to-day account of life under tyranny and the struggle for survival among Jews in totalitarian Germany. His diary also details the Nazi's perversion of the German language for propaganda purposes, which Klemperer would use as the basis for his book LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii [Language of the Third Reich].

– Victor Klemperer from Wikipedia.

Klemperer's day-by-day account of the Holocaust, the cruelty of the local Dresden Gestapo, the suicide of Jews as they are ordered to join the transports east, his early knowledge of Auschwitz – Klemperer got word of this most infamous of extermination camps as early as March 1942, although he did not realise the scale of the mass murders there until the closing months of the war – fill one with rage that anyone could still deny the reality of the Jewish genocide.

Reading these diaries as the RER train takes me out to Charles de Gaulle airport – through the 1930s art deco architecture of Drancy station where French Jews were taken by their own police force before transportation to Auschwitz – I wish President Ahmadinejad of Iran could travel with me.

For Ahmadinejad it was who called the Jewish Holocaust a "myth", who ostentatiously called for a conference – in Tehran, of course – to find out the truth about the genocide of six million Jews, which any sane historian acknowledges to be one of the terrible realities of the 20th century, along, of course, with the Holocaust of one and a half million Armenians in 1915.

The best reply to Ahmadinejad's childish nonsense came from ex-president Khatami of Iran, the only honourable Middle East leader of our time, whose refusal to countenance violence by his own supporters inevitably and sadly led to the demise of his "civil society" at the hands of more ruthless clerical opponents. "The death of even one Jew is a crime," Khatami said, thus destroying in one sentence the lie that his successor was trying to propagate.

Indeed, his words symbolised something more important: that the importance and the evil of the Holocaust do not depend on the Jewish identity of the victims. The awesome, wickedness of the Holocaust lies in the fact that the victims were human beings – just like you and me.

How do we then persuade the Muslims of the Middle East of this simple truth? I thought that the letter which the head of the Iranian Jewish Committee, Haroun Yashayaie, wrote to Ahmadinejad provided part of the answer. "The Holocaust is not a myth any more than the genocide imposed by Saddam (Hussein) on Halabja or the massacre by (Ariel) Sharon of Palestinians and Lebanese in the camps of Sabra and Chatila," Yashayaie – who represents Iran's 25,000 Jews – said.

Note here how there is no attempt to enumerate the comparisons. Six million murdered Jews is a numerically far greater crime than the thousands of Kurds gassed at Halabja or the 1,700 Palestinians murdered by Israel's Lebanese Phalangist allies at Sabra and Chatila in 1982. But Yashayaie's letter was drawing a different kind of parallel: the pain that the denial of history causes to the survivors.

– "There is No Remedy Against the Language of Truth": A Lesson from the Holocaust for Us All by Robert Fisk, 06 April 2006.

"It's not the big things which are important to me," Klemperer replied, "but the everyday life of tyranny, which gets forgotten. A 1,000 mosquito bites are worse than a blow to the head. I observe, note down the mosquito bites."

That's it but that's not it. What he does is to bring a group of people to life and show how these entirely ordinary individuals, old women with canaries and men who liked to argue philosophy, widows and young women looking for husbands, were taken from the lives they knew before Hitler and added to the list of six million. The mosquito bites recorded by Klemperer are none of them minor or simply irritating, but go deep, beginning with the wholesale expulsion of Jews from jobs on the state payroll. The loss of jobs, the wearing of the star and the banning from public parks were the only ones I had remembered. There were many more, each bitter in its own way.

A partial list, as recorded by Klemperer: banned from library reading rooms (October 1936), forced to give up the telephone (December 1936), required to add 'Israel' or 'Sara' to given names (i.e. Klemperer must henceforth sign his name 'Victor Israel' – August 1938), restricted to shopping between 3 and 4 pm (August 1940), banned from owning a car (February 1941), "the milkmaid… is no longer allowed to deliver to Jews' houses" (March 1941), "new calamity: ban on smoking for Jews" (August 1941), required to surrender typewriters ("That hit me hard, it is virtually irreplaceable" – October 1941), banned from use of public telephones (December 1941), banned from the buying of flowers (March 1942), banned from keeping pets ("This is the death sentence for Muschel," their tomcat – May 1942), forbidden to provide for the teaching of Jewish children either privately or communally (July 1942), banned from purchase or possession of newspapers (July 1942), prohibited from purchase of eggs or vegetables (July 1942), prohibited from purchase of meat and white bread (October 1942). "Not a day without a new decree against Jews," Klemperer writes.

But that wasn't all. In stages Jews were banned from practising their professions, banned from public transport, banned not only from parks but from the streets bordering on parks, banned from restaurants, banned from theatres and cinemas, banned from being outside after the hour of 9pm. These progressive steps were gradually accompanied and finally replaced by a programme of organised murder – for Jews in Dresden deportation to Theresienstadt, a transit camp on the way to Auschwitz, "which appears", Klemperer writes in October 1942, "to be a swift-working slaughterhouse".

– The everyday life of tyranny by Thomas Powers, 14 September 2000.