Search Results for: klemperer

The international bestselling record of a German Jew in Nazi Germany.

‘Deserves to stand beside the diary of Anne Frank as a day-to-day description of the sufferings of the victims of Hitler’s evil regime’ EVENING STANDARD

‘Few English readers will fail to be moved as I was – ultimately to the point of tears’ SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

‘Packed with vivid observation, profound reflection … they find hope, dignity and even tart humour in the jaws of hell’ INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

A sensation when first published, this is one of the most extraordinary documents of the Nazi period. The son of a rabbi, Klemperer was by 1933 a professor of languages in Dresden. Over the next decade he lost his job, his house and many of his friends, even his cat, as Jews were not allowed to own pets. Saved for much of the war from the Holocaust by his marriage to a gentile, he was able to escape in the aftermath of the Allied bombing of Dresden and survived the remaining months of the war in hiding. Throughout, Klemperer kept a diary, for a Jew in Nazi Germany a daring act in itself. This volume covers the period from the beginnings of the Holocaust to the end of the war, telling the story of Klemperer’s increasing isolation, his near miraculous survival, his awareness of the development of the growing Holocaust as friends and associates disappeared, and his narrow escapes from deportation and the Dresden firebombing in 1945.

Shocking and moving by turns, it is a remarkable and important document, as powerful and astonishing in its way as Anne Frank’s classic.

A publishing sensation, the publication of Victor Klemperer’s diaries brings to light one of the most extraordinary documents of the Nazi period.

‘A classic … Klemperer’s diary deserves to rank alongside that of Anne Frank’s’ SUNDAY TIMES

‘I can’t remember when I read a more engrossing book’ Antonia Fraser

‘Not dissimilar in its cumulative power to Primo Levi’s, is a devastating account of man’s inhumanity to man’ LITERARY REVIEW

The son of a rabbi, Klemperer was by 1933 a professor of languages at Dresden. Over the next decade he, like other German Jews, lost his job, his house and many of his friends.

Klemperer remained loyal to his country, determined not to emigrate, and convinced that each successive Nazi act against the Jews must be the last. Saved for much of the war from the Holocaust by his marriage to a gentile, he was able to escape in the aftermath of the Allied bombing of Dresden and survived the remaining months of the war in hiding. Throughout, Klemperer kept a diary. Shocking and moving by turns, it is a remarkable and important account.

The superb, bestselling diaries of Victor Klemperer, a Jew in Dresden who survived the war – hailed as one of the 20th century’s most important chronicles.

‘Compulsive reading’ LITERARY REVIEW ‘Deeply engrossing’ SPECTATOR

‘Klemperer’s diary deserves to rank alongside that of Anne Frank’ SUNDAY TIMES

‘A vivid and powerful account of a remarkable life’ SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY

June 1945. The immediate postwar period produces many shocks and revelations – some people have behaved better than Klemperer had believed, others much worse. His sharp observations are now turned on the East German Communist Party, which he himself joins, and he notes many similarities between Nazi and Communist behaviour. Politics, he comes to believe, is above all the choice of the “lesser evil”. He serves in the GDR’s People’s Chamber and represents East German scholarship abroad. But it is the details of everyday life, and the honesty and directness, that make these bestselling diaries so fascinating.