Victor Klemperer
Personal Information
Description
Victor Klemperer (9 October 1881 – 11 February 1960) was a German philologist and diarist. His journals, published posthumously in Germany in 1995, detailed his life under the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, the fascist Third Reich, and the German Democratic Republic. Three volumes of his diaries have been published in English translations: I Shall Bear Witness, To the Bitter End, and The Lesser Evil. The first two, which cover the period of the Third Reich, have become standard sources and have been extensively quoted. His book LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen, published in English as The Language of the Third Reich, examined how Nazi propaganda co-opted and corrupted German words and expressions. Source: [Victor Klemperer]( on Wikipedia.
Books
LTI. Notizbuch eines Philologen
"Victor Klemperer (1881-1960) was Professor of French Literature at Dresden University. As a Jew, he was removed from his university post in 1935, only surviving thanks to his marriage to an Aryan. From 1933 to 1935 Klemperer kept detailed diaries, which contain in note form some of the raw material for the German edition of LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii. First published in 1957, The Language of the Third Reich arose from Klemperer's conviction that the language of the Third Reich helped to create its culture. As Klemperer writes: 'It isn't only Nazi actions that have to vanish, but also the Nazi cast of mind, the typical Nazi way of thinking, and its breeding ground: the language of Nazism.' This brilliant book is by turns entertaining and profound, saddening and horrifying. It is deservedly one of the great twentieth-century studies of language and its engagement with history. Translated by Dr. Martin Brady"--
The Lesser evil?
This book comprises 14 essays by scholars who disagree about the methods and purposes of comparing Nazism and Communism. The central idea is that if these two different memories of evil were to develop in isolation, their competition for significance would distort the real evils both movements propagated. Whilst many reject this comparison because they feel it could relativize the evil of one of these movements, the claim that a political movement is uniquely evil can only be made by comparing it to another movement.How do these issues affect postwar interrelations between memory and history? Are there tensions between the ways postwar societies remember these atrocities, and the ways in which intellectuals and scholars reconstruct what happened? Nazism and Communism have been constantly compared since the 1920s. A sense of the ways in which these comparisons have been used and abused by both Right and Left belongs to our common history.These twentieth century evils invite comparison, if only because of their traumatic effects. We have an obligation to understand what happened, and we also have an obligation to understand how we have dealt with it.
Man möchte immer weinen und lachen in einem
"Victor Klemperers Schilderung des Chaos nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg und des Scheiterns der Münchner Räterepublik. Solch genaue, anschauliche Momentaufnahmen aus der belagerten Stadt findet man nirgendwo sonst. Ein bewegendes, mit Spannung zu lesendes Gesamtbild von diesem entscheidenden Wendepunkt der deutschen Geschichte - aus der Revolution von 1918/19 ging nicht nur die erste deutsche Demokratie hervor, zugleich kündigte sich in ihr das kommende Unheil an"--