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Sometimes a book finds its time. I Shall Bear Witness, diaries written in Germany between 1933 and 1945, is one of those books. I wonder how many threatened people in the United States are documenting daily events as Victor Klemperer did in Nazi Germany. I wonder how many of the non-threatened have read these two volumes.

 

I came across I Shall Bear Witness in 1998, not long after Martin Chalmers’ English translation hit the book stores. The Financial Times had produced a year-end survey of publishing house editors, asking them what book published that year was the one they wished they had signed for, but didn’t. The commentary on I Shall Bear Witness seized my attention. This was a book I had to have. That was volume one. I had to wait until 2001 for volume 2.

 

Victor Klemperer was a German Protestant convert. He was born of Jewish parents in 1881. He married Eva Schlemer, a Protestant, in 1906, and served as a soldier in World War I. After the war he became a professor of French and Romance languages at a technical university in Dresden.

 

These facts are all significant because they are the reason Klemperer remained in Dresden right up to the fire-bombing of that city on the night of February 13th, 1945. On the morning of February 13th, 1945 all Jews remaining in Dresden had been ordered to report for deportation on February 16th. There were then 198 people registered as Jews remaining in the city and Victor Klemperer was one of them. On the morning of February 14th, the morning after the fire-bombing, Klemperer pulled the yellow star off his clothing and he and his wife walked out of Dresden and right across southern Germany, until they reached American forces occupying Bavaria.

 

Klemperer was dismissed from his post as a professor not because he was a Jew. He lost his job prior to that order, during the Nazi clampdown on the universities. French literature was not on the Nazi list of appropriate curriculum for a technical university. Klemperer’s classes diminished in size to the point that he was part of budget cuts in 1935. That, as it turned out, was fortunate, because he got a pension. Dismissed Jews did not get pensions.

 

Klemperer’s war service had allowed him to continue teaching to ever diminishing class sizes until the crunch came and probably had a bearing on him keeping his pension. He and Eva moved out of Dresden and built themselves a house in a small village. They had a large garden. He bought a car and learned to drive. They visited places, travelling on the fine new roads.

 

In May 1940, the Klemperers were forced to rent out their home and move to a Jews house. But they were still relatively safe, despite all the indignities and deprivations, because Eva was in that protected category of “Aryan”. They also still had an income.

 

In his introduction to I Shall Bear Witness Martin Chalmers writes: ‘The point at which some kind of normal life, under the conditions of a racist dictatorship, becomes impossible is the November 1933 pogrom (Chrystal Night) rather than the war, which begins with the German attack on Poland a little under a year later.’

 

By the autumn of 1941 Jews could not legally leave Germany.

 

So why didn’t the Klemperers flee while they could? Victor’s elder brother, Georg, was living in the United States. They had the possibility of sponsorship and support.

 

The answer to that question lies within the pages of the diaries.

 

‘New Year’s Eve ’38, Saturday

…I do not want to assert prematurely that we have already reached the last circle of hell, for uncertainty is not the worst thing, because in uncertainty there is still hope. Also we still have pension and house…We must not let ourselves be deceived by the relative calm of recent weeks: in a couple of months we are finished here or “they” are.

            Recently I have really been doing everything humanly possible to get out of here: the list of my publications and my SOS calls have gone everywhere: to Lima, to Jerusalem, to Sydney, to the Quakers via Miss Livingstone. I gave the affidavit sent by Georg’s youngest to the US Consulate in Berlin, confirmed by telephone that the Mr Geist named by Georg is still there and will be available after the New Year, and wrote a letter requesting a personal audience. But that any of it will do any good at all, is more than doubtful.

            Moral was here again on Thursday afternoon: feeling of friendship and isolation and the same irresolution. He thinks and hesitates as we do. Away into absolute nothingness?’

 

‘1941, 27th July, Sunday

New regulations about immigration into the USA. Our affidavit (which we have received twice!) is thereby invalid – the new procedure means effectively that it will be impossible to get out in any foreseeable future. That suits us entirely. All vacillation is now at an end. Fate will decide. As long as the war lasts we can no longer get out, after the war we shall no longer need to, one way or another, dead or alive.’

 

All through the mounting fear, harassment and persecution Victor Klemperer keeps his diary, in itself an act of resistance and a dangerous one. He sends pages for safe keeping to a non-Jewish friend.

 

That sense of community, of people stubbornly holding on to friendship and decency lives alongside the daily struggle, the hopes and uncertainties, and the growing diary.

 

‘Since for Eva’s sake I limit the amount of typing (and also because paper is becoming an ever more rare article), I shall go back to the “solid form” using an old diary … I shall get the loose sheets to Annemarie as soon as possible.’

 

The German title of I Shall Bear Witness is ‘Ich will Zueugnis ablegen bis zum letzen’. The diaries published in Germany under this title were already abridged. For the English language version Martin Chalmers further abridged the work and added notes and an introduction. Chalmers did far more than translate these volumes for the English-speaking market. He produced them. I have long held that translators should be acknowledged on the cover of a book and where the translator brings his skills as a historian he should surely receive a place there.

 

‘Ich will Zueugnis ablegen bis zum letzen’ translates as ‘I will bear witness to the last.’

 

Why is the title one of my volumes ‘I Shall Bear Witness’ and the other, ‘I Will Bear Witness’? Nothing profound, I believe: my second volume was published in the United States where ‘will’ is common and ‘shall’ is not often used. But I like ‘shall’. It has biblical tones; a sense of endurance. ‘And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.’

 

I Shall Bear Witness is two long volumes, but Klemperer, in Chalmers’ abridgement, is an engaging writer. The text has forward momentum. It’s a page-turner. And, if you are witnessing what is going on in the United States right now, you can do little better than learn what went on in daily life in Germany between 1933 and 1945.