Omer Bartov. 2003. Germany's War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories. Cornell University Press. pp. 197–98 Anne Frank will always remain the best starting point for understanding the Holocaust, because her voice speaks directly to children across the decades. The historical value of the Klemperer diaries is, however, incomparably greater. Its wealth of detail, its sensitivity to linguistic and social nuance, its political insight and awareness, its humane intelligence—these qualities leave all other such efforts in the shade. Like Samuel Pepys in his time, like the Duc de Saint Simon or James Boswell in theirs, Klemperer evokes the atmosphere of Nazi Germany so well that the stench fills one’s nostrils. And all the while, the horror of his story is illuminated by shafts of dry, bitter wit. 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 extreme situations. Dresden was known before the war as the "Florence of the North." Very little of its baroque splendor remains. The view of Dresden today from the surrounding hills is almost as bleak as that of, say, Kaliningrad or of some other Communist city Like many completely assimilated Jews in Wilhelminian and Weimar Germany, he believed that Germans were, as he put it, a "chosen people," culturally and politically superior to others. "I still feel more shame than fear," he wrote

November 24, 1936– On the language of the Third Reich:...The Fuhrer must be followed blindly, blindly! They do not need to explain anything at all, since they are accountable to no one. Today it occurred to me: Never has the tension between human power and powerlessness, human knowledge and human stupidity been so overwhelmingly great as now. People in their daily routine, preoccupied with problems and goals, rarely stop for a moment to ask the question "Why?" They accept the world as it is and do not ask why is it as it is. "Why?" is a difficult question that not always has an easy answer. It requires awareness not only of the wondrous, but of what is moral and good. We sometimes consciously avoid this question. It often endangers our survival, because it opens the doors for the general truths and personal motives . Usually "Why?" is victim's question. People with "normal" lives do not like it. It makes them insecure, rebellious, lonely... older brothers, especially his eldest, Georg, who became an eminent surgeon, he long vacillated about what profession to adopt. He tentatively explored several options: a commercial, a literary and, in the end, an academic career. Klemperer, for whom the Nietzschean idea of “living dangerously” was not the whim of an intellectual spectator but an inescapable fact of life as a Jew in the Third Reich, is more clear-sighted about the Nazis than Jünger or the countless literati who thought like him. In April 1933, during the first weeks of the Nazi “seizure of power,” he saw that anti-Semitism was not mere demagogy, not a means to an end, but, however incomprehensibly, it was the end itself: “The fate of the Hitler movement will undoubtedly be decided by the Jewish business. I do not understand why they have made this point of their program so central. It will sink them. But we will probably go down with them.” the war "imposed" onto a peace-loving Führer. (France and the United Kingdom did declare war on Germany, but only after Germany remilitarized the Rhineland, annexed Austria, annexed Czechoslovakia and invaded Poland.)Klemperer, who primarily identified as “German,” was the son of a reform rabbi and converted to Protestantism in 1912. For the Nazis, however, he remained a Jew and was persecuted as such. His careful observations and analyses from the Weimar Republic, the National Socialist era, and the German Democratic Republic illuminate what it meant to live under these three regimes. snow and works in a Dresden factory. He must walk to work (nearly four miles each way) since the use of all public transportation is forbidden to Jews. Omer Bartov. 2003. Germany's War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories. Cornell University Press. p. 200 Klemperer was recently awarded posthumously the prestigious Geschwister Scholl Prize for Civic Courage. (Sophie and Hans Scholl, two young students, were executed in 1943 for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets.) Walser happened to be the main speaker at

of the Jewish experience in Germany with a "mouthful of self-congratulations" and the evocation of an "obscenely harmonized German-Jewish culture." Language Does Not Lie [5] ( La langue ne ment pas), a 2003 documentary film based on Klemperer's book, directed by Stan Neumann Omer Bartov. 2003. Germany's War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories. Cornell University Press. pp. 205–208

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 Walser’s remarks dovetailed with the turn-of-the-millennium wish of the left-wing government of Chancellor Gerhard Schroder to banish unwelcome and inconvenient memories. Of Goldhagen’s book, Schroder had this to say: “I haven’t read it; but I don’t believe it makes sense to claim that all Germany not only knew of the murder of the Jews, but also wanted it.” In Schröder’s case—his father was killed on the Russian front—filial piety may explain this reluctance to confront the guilt of ordinary Germans. But what a German politician, especially a left-wing one, also knows is that saying he has not read Goldhagen is something public opinion will largely approve of. That this moral cowardice has not altogether disappeared from mainstream German opinion today is, finally, the lesson implicit in the reception of the Klemperer diaries. In effect, Klemperer has been made to say what most Germans want him to say: namely, that, during the war years, they, just like every other nation, were a “normal” mixture of good and evil. This interpretation is even shared by some older historians in the United States. Thus, Fritz Stern has recommended Klemperer as a balance to Goldhagen, and especially as one whose more “nuanced picture” includes the Germans’“moments of decency and quiet help.” Similarly, István Deák, writing in the New Republic, asserts that the diaries show how “in Dresden . . . ‘ordinary’ Germans tended to behave decently toward the frail, bent, old professor. . . . Unlike the minority of radical anti-Semites, the majority of Europeans did not want all the Jews to disappear from their midst; they wanted only that there should be fewer Jews.”

The proclamation and injunction of the boycott committee decrees "Religion is immaterial," only race matters. If, in the case of the owners of a business, the husband is Jewish, the wife Christian or the other way around, then the business counts as Jewish. well at night. His nightmares start when he wakes up. He expects to be deported at any moment. He occasionally scavenges the garbage for food. A few elderly people, seeing the Judenstern on his coat, come up in the dark and silently shake Fleeing Dresden in February 1945, after the great Allied bombardment that leveled the city in a single night, he finally lost faith not only in Germany but in the entire human race. Yet not for long. Eva Klemperer tore the yellow Judenstern off her husband's Walser's speech caused a stir. The philosopher Jurgen Habermas, visibly angry, walked out of the assembly hall. A few days later Habermas protested in the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper against Walser's attempt to whitewash the tragic dimension

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) Maintaining the diary and getting it out of the house periodically to a safe hiding place took on life-and-death importance. The diary was his "balancing rod without which I would crash into the abyss." After 1941, he was pressed into work as It underlines odd constructions of words intended to give a "scientific" or neutral aspect to otherwise heavily engaged discourses, as well as significant every-day behaviour. Hitler's rise to power is described as the result of a chaotic mixture of nihilism and masochism, a rebellion against authority and at the same time a neurotic submission to it. "It is amazing," Klemperer notes soon after