Victor Klemperer
A first hand account of daily life in the Third Reich and of a double escape from death by the narrowest of margins.
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SLIDE 1 (intro)
You may also wish to read a summary in his own words of the most trying parts of his ordeal (3 minute read). https://www.ogn.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/odonoghueaogo2015.pdf
So as not to predudice you with my view I’d like to start by reading this student tribute.
The lecture theatre was usually packed. Punctually at quarter past a small elderly gentleman entered and was greeted with lively knocking on the desks [a German student custom].
He really was unusually small. His height and features were a little reminiscent of the painter Pablo Picasso. He bowed a little in acknowledgement of the student applause, smiled and began to speak. His voice was very clear and very melodious. He spoke in a way which I had not heard an academic teacher speak before.
He spoke with considerable digressions, he spoke wittily, entertainingly, but nevertheless always stuck closely to the topic, had titles and dates in his head, some in French, some in German. In his hands, literature, French literature, the literature of the Romance languages, world literature, became a dense and gracefully entwined plant, unceasingly sending out new sprigs like an old ivy.
SLIDE 2 (intro)
Who was Victor Klemperer and why should we be interested in him?
He was born in Germany in 1881 the youngest of eight children.
He was identified early on as being ‘unworldly’ so much so that his father made his brothers promise to always look after him.
He left school at 16, did 3 years of a commercial apprenticeship then went back to secondary school finishing at the late age 21, then to Uni for three years, then a journalist for 7 years then a post-graduate student, then lecturer, and at age 39 in Dresden became a professor of French literature and other Romance languages.
Much of this schooling was paid for by his brothers.
His brother, Georg, was one of Germany’s most eminent surgeons, was internationally renowned because he had treated the Russian leader Lenin. He was also very wealthy.
VK was a Jew but then again he wasn’t. In an effort to identify completely as a German he had had himself baptised and was a paying member of the Lutheran congregation.
He married non-Jewish Eva in 1905. She was a concert pianist. The relatives on both sides were not happy with the marriage and her side cut them off completely and forever.
Now, a bit about the diaries which he started when he was 17.
They remained unpublished for 50 years and were a runaway success when they appeared in 1995, selling over 140 thousand hardback copies in the first year.
The diaries have a kind of unique immediacy & authenticity & give a bird’s eye view of the Nazi and the Communist years.
He never meant them to be published - they are somewhat self-critical and unflattering.
I’m guessing Germans liked them because, among other things, during the Nazi years they showed many of their countrymen in a good light.
SLIDE 3 (1933)
The English translations of the diaries begin only in 1933. For this talk. I am going to pick one or two highlights from each year. The very first entry (Jan 14 1933) includes this.
The miseries of the new year the same as before, the house, the cold, lack of time, lack of money, no hope of credit, Eva's obsession with building the house, and her desperation still growing. The domestic misery, lighting stoves, dusting, drying dishes - precious hours wasted.
So here we already have two themes that recur:
Lack of money & Victor’s domestic chores.
Two other repetitive themes are:
The ill health of both - real and imaginary. They were hypochondriacs.
And the fourth - Writing. - Books, lectures, essays, diary. He was a voracious writer.
About the lack of money - As a professor he got paid in today’s equivalent over £100,000 a year net. Yet lack of money is mentioned nearly every month. We can talk about why afterwards - also, ask me about their domestic servants - or lack thereof. All money mentioned here has been converted to 2023 UK value.
SLIDE 4 (1933)
Hitler came to power at the end of January.
State sponsored persecution began in earnest. e.g. Certain newspapers were closed down their editors imprisoned and some murdered.
Victor fears for his life and is sure he will soon lose his job.
The couple had a wide circle of friends but they gradually mostly wither away - Jews emigrating & non-Jews forbidden to associate.
SLIDE 5 (1933)
Eva had been badgering him for years to get a house built - after all, she said, many people on more modest incomes were doing so.
But Victor never felt up to it, he was busy with his work and didn’t feel like dealing with lawyers architects and builders.
Yes, he had a large salary but they were big spenders and at age 52 had only enough savings to buy a plot of land.
Who then would lend money to a 52 y.o. Jew who will soon lose his job?
SLIDE 6 (1934)
One of their non-Jewish friends had recently inherited the estate of their English mother.
Under Nazi law a German had to repatriate assets which would be reimbursed locally in Nazi currency.
The friend didn’t want to keep this money as cash so offered to loan part of it to Victor using his yet to be built house as security.
Victor jokes that it is thanks to Hitler that they can finally build their house.
SLIDE 7 (1934)
The finished house (a few extensions later). Still there today you can see it on Google street view. The house and garden are Eva’s pride and joy.
SLIDE 8 (1935)
Finally gets the sack with a pension of 60% final salary, nearly three times the minimum wage.
Throws himself even more into academic writing but can no longer find a publisher.
Asks brother Georg for a loan of £35,000 and gets it. Spends some of it on an extension.
The year finishes with him taking driving lessons and he mulls buying a car. His driving test is booked for January.
SLIDES 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 (1936)
Passes the test and buys car in March. Four year old Opel, 6 cylinder, 55hp. Cost £5000.
What a beauty, isn’t it? But of course it is a banger or jalopy. The car needs an overhaul and a local grocer recommends a “reliable” mechanic, Michael. In the first month the car breaks down nearly every day & Michael hands him a receipt for every repair. After a month V gets wise and takes the car to a regular garage & there is some improvement - it only breaks down every other week..
Despite car’s unreliability both get great pleasure out of motoring trips, driving nearly 4000 miles in 9 months.
Completes the first volume of his massive treatise of 18th Century French literature. It has taken 2 years.
Georg, who is now in USA, unexpectedly sends him £3000 and urges him to leave Germany.
SLIDE 14 (1937)
Car continues to prove unreliable but they manage to squeeze in plenty trips still deriving deep pleasure from them.
Another unexpected £3000 arrives from Georg but is soon spent.
Only 95 pages of his Volume II is produced work this year but has started his autobiography.
SLIDE 15 (1938)
Georg sends yet another £3000 but then an ominous 6-week gap in diary, explained follows.
In October he gets an aneurysm in his groin but the only doctor licensed to treat Jews is in Berlin.
Victor drives there, doctor gives him partial relief but advises him to get properly catheterised in secret at a non-Jewish doctor near Dresden.
But on travelling back, brakes sharply to avoid a motorcyclist and ends up in a field having been thrown out of the car.
He is not severely hurt. Eva is bleeding but also OK.
A passing doctor looks after them. Victor mentions that he urgently needs catheterised.
Doctor takes him to his hospital and performs the operation ignoring Victor’s confession that he is a Jew.
Two weeks later Kristallnacht, when all the synagogues in Germany are put to arson and tens of thousands of jews are arrested and sent to concentration camps.
Victor finally decides that he wants to emigrate but it is now too late!
Driving licences are withdrawn from Jews and the car is scrapped for £1000.
SLIDE 16 (1939)
War starts in September.
Jews are put on a curfew.
Also they are restricted in how much ready cash they can keep. All other assets to be put into a blocked account from which they have to apply and are restricted to what they can spend it on.
Victor & Eva are ordered to leave their house and will be given two rooms elsewhere.
“Friendly” grocer Berger rents his house and plots to get it off him. Victor being naive does not yet see it.
SLIDE 17 (1940)
In 1939 the c.1500 Jews remaining in Dresden at the beginning of the war were resettled in several “Jews’ Houses” in order for it to be easier for the Gestapo to control them with a view to their elimination.
As the months and years follow V sees his fellow residents disappearing one by one.
His diaries contain pages and pages describing the residents.
Through his writing he hopes to build a monument to them.
Victor constantly worries when it will be his turn to be eliminated.
He continues work on his autobiography.
SLIDE 18 (1941)
One night forgets to draw blackout curtains and is sentenced to 8 days prison.
Georg sends £18,000 but after tax V gets only £4000 and that only in instalments and only by application.
In September Jews are ordered to wear the yellow star.
SLIDE 19 (1942)
First spell of labour service - 6 weeks shovelling snow as part of a group of elderly Jews. He is the youngest at 61.
Discovers that Berger and local Nazi mayor are in cahoots to get his house but his lawyer is resisting.
Lawyer then sacked for being too obliging towards Jews.
A new lawyer RICHTER is even friendlier but more circumspect. Takes a liking to Victor and offers to help protect him.
He saves the house for Victor but was soon in prison for other reasons. Nevertheless the house has been saved.
SLIDE 20 (1942)
V has had a previous run in with Gestapo that left him shaken but then in June suffers four house searches in 19 days - by these two characters.
Senior officers, educated, known as the Hitter and Spitter. Trained to harass Jews to make them commit suicide. Ask me afterwards about their post war fate.
They find a Nazi book which V is studying and object that a Jew is reading it. VK gets hit on head for 3 minutes with it, but is saved from arrest as it from the library on Eva’s card.
SLIDE 21 (1942)
Moved to 2nd Jews House in September.
SLIDE 22 (1942)
Makes a list of anti-Jewish restrictions.
Other than diary has not managed any writing all year.
SLIDE 23 (1943)
Second period of labour service - tea & herb packing plant - 6.5 months
SLIDE 24 (1943)
Third period of labour service - Envelope and paper bag factory - 7.5 months. He jokingly calls this machine an envelope making town. An anecdote - His trainer is a non-Jewish diminutive hunchback female who can make 14,000 envelopes a day compared to Victor’s 4000, much to the anger of his charge-hand. She surreptitiously helps V increase his quota.
SLIDE 25 (1943)
Moved to third Jews House in December.
Apart from diary very little writing. Too busy at the factory and domestic chores.
In November his pension is stopped.
In December he is diagnosed with angina pectoris and plots to get himself classified as unfit for work.
SLIDE 26 (1944)
And succeeds. In June he is released from work permanently.
In October, Dresden bombed for the first time.
SLIDE 27 (1945)
Now we come to the most intense and thrilling part of the diaries.
On Tuesday Feb 13 Victor was called to Jewish Community office and told to deliver letters to nine families.
The letters order the 200 Jews still in Dresden to assemble at the Train Station in two days for onward deportation - a guaranteed death sentence. But Victor is exempt for the time being.
Victor delivers the letters and it is only afterwards that he realises that he has been made an accessory to persecution.
Indeed after war the official who handed him the letters got ten years in a Soviet prison and died there.
Victor immediately brings his diary up to date.
At 10pm of the same day the following happens - Watch & see Dresden before and after.
SLIDE 28
SLIDE 29 (1945)
RAF dropped 900t of bombs on the first raid and three hours later 1800t.
V&E manage to dodge the bombs falling on their flat, clamber their way over the burning rubble to the relative safety of the waterfront. Eva rips the yellow star off V’s jacket and resolve to get far away from Dresden and away from the local Gestapo. They assume new identities and forge new papers. He writes:-
The next twelve days on the run were full of exertions, of hunger, of sleeping on the bare stone floor of a railway station, of bombs dropped on the moving train and on the waiting room where we were supposed to be fed at last, of walking at night along the bombed railway line, of wading in streams alongside smashed bridges, of cowering in bunkers, of sweating, of freezing and shivering in sodden footwear, of rattling bursts of fire from hedgehoppers — but much worse than all that was the ceaseless and agonising fear of being challenged and imprisoned.
SLIDE 30 (1945)
Eventually they escape to relative safety in Unterbernbach, arriving on 12th April. The war ends and they make their way back to Dresden, 250 miles, mainly on foot. Further adventures on the way back.
SLIDE 31 (1945)
Arriving in their rags on the street of their house they are greeted by a neighbour. “We were just talking about you yesterday” she said, “You must come in for a coffee.” The same neighbour that shunned them during the Nazi years.
This sets the tone going forward - All and sundry come looking for a reference from V because being a professor and especially being one of only 70 surviving Jews in Dresden he has become a V.I.P.
Immediately get their house back. The nazi grocer who had tried to claim their house had fled.
Here ends the excitement. The tension in the story gradually disappears like air escaping from a balloon. The rest of this story is somewhat ordinary yet there are still one or two highlights.
SLIDE 32 (1945)
Victor joins the Communist Party. This is surprising because before the war he was firm in the belief that Communists were as bad as the Nazis. He had lost friends because of it. He and Eva spend days discussing the ins and outs and the do not deny that there was a pecuniary interest in joining. V at 64 is still ambitious and wants to make up for a career lost during the twelve Nazi years.
SLIDE 33 (1946)
Indeed by the start of 1946 joining has paid dividends. He now six jobs … but only one salary! He is allowed to freelance for extra income.
His old job as Professor of Philology at the TH although he rarely lectures there.
Director of the newly instituted “Public High School’ where is is responsible for hiring and setting curricula.
An officer of the ‘Kulturbund’ - a politico/cultural organisation.
An officer in the Communist Party (with a view to getting into parliament).
His private writing - books, essays, radio broadcasts.
His private lecturing.
Earns so much that by the end of 1946 he is able to pay off his mortgage. Tries to get a car but only has irregular access to pool cars with driver.
SLIDE 34 (1947)
Since before becoming a professor he has longed for a University Chair. Dresden was only a technical college with no chair.
He is a big shot now and was head-hunted by Griefswald. A house is bought for him, and being naive & trusting, Victor accepts the post without examining the house.
In December when they get there it is a dump, damp and almost uninhabitable.
Immediately protested and said they were leaving as soon as possible.
SLIDE 35 (1948)
Is offered Chair at the University of Halle and moves there in August after he and Eva previously inspected a good apartment.
No written productions all year but gives many lectures and attends many meetings.
SLIDE 36 (1949)
Eva has a heart attack but recovers.
Victor again gives many lectures including one to 6000 workers in the Agfa photographic factory.
But no written material published.
Appointed first Regional Chairman of the Kulturbund.
SLIDE 37 (1950)
They move from Halle back to their house in Dresden.
“We eat too well, don’t know what to do with our money”.
Victor gets a guest Professorship at Berlin University and begins a regular commute :- Dresden - Berlin - Halle.
Falls out with Eva because of constant chaos of house renovation and rebuilding. Eva still in poor health and feels cut off in her Dresden suburb without a car.
Elected to Parliament and gives a single speech.
Begins to mull doubts over his adherence to Communism.
SLIDE 38 (1951)
Victor now feels left out.
“I feel I am an intruder. Eva lives her little woman life here with the maid, craftsmen, cat and garden. I introduce disturbance, ill-humour, arrive exhausted, dejected, desk is in a muddle, every moment gardeners, joiners, carpenters swarming around. Then harsh words”. Eva feels like a prisoner.
In April is finally able to buy a car a hire a driver. Eva is in much better spirits and they go touring again despite the BMW being unreliable.
In July, four days before her 69th birthday Eva has a heart attack and dies. She gets an “official” funeral with dignitaries attending.
Victor continues to lecture and is still ambitious although he feels guilty for having neglected Eva.
SLIDE 39 (1952)
Who do you think this 25 year old woman is. A niece perhaps… the daughter of a friend… a student of his maybe? Yes a student, but also his new wife! Her name is Hadwig Kirchner.
SLIDE 40 (1952 - 1960)
V is now firmly embedded in the establishment.
“Appointment diary full to the brim”.
Continues to attend Parliament but finds it boring
Continues to give many lectures.
Visits his loyal maid in Piskowitz and gifts her £50,000 to build a small house.
Awarded National Prize (very lucrative) and is admitted to the Academy of Science.
First heart attack in 1954 but recovers in 3 months and continues to lecture.
Long trips abroad with Hadwig to Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, France, West Germany, Italy, China.
Sees some of his books published but for political reasons not all.
Gradually then finally breaks with Communism with the last significant diary entry explaining “why I do not publicly recant Communism?”
In March 1959 gives his last lecture in Halle.
In April he has second heart attack and is nursed at home by Hadwig. Recovers a bit and is able to several times tour and visit friends with Hadwig and driver.
Admitted to Hospital in early October but is still able to go drives. Visited every day by Hadwig and visited regularly by his nephew & nephew’s wife.
Last diary entry October 29th. Dies Feb 11th 1960 aged 78.