Antisemitism According to Victor Klemperer
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Antisemitism According to Victor Klemperer Miriam Oelsner.* People of Abraham, fighting against obstacles of all kinds are working their way upwards to humanity.1 1. INTRODUCTION … Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously. Words can be like tiny doses of ar- senic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all.2 Victor Klemperer (1881-1960) was born in Germany to a Jewish family and later became an outstanding specialist of French literature.3 As a full professor of Latin letters at Dresden Technical University from 1920, he had strong ties to the works of Montes- quieu, Voltaire, and Diderot. He was impregnated with the “illuminist” way of thinking, and his free-faculty thesis was about Montesquieu, under the advisement of Karl Vossler, dean of Munich University.4 Klemperer spent the early years of his career in Munich, where one of his colleagues, also advised by Vossler, was another famous Latinist, Erich Auerbach, the author of Mimesis. The importance of speaking about Victor Klemperer in the context of antisemitism relates to his analysis of the totalitarian Nazi regime, after he and his wife spent the twelve years of terror in Germany. It has to be said that this analysis was essentially oriented toward language, since Klemperer had discovered that language was a very powerful weapon used by the Nazi terror. The Nazis manipulated language with the general purpose of embedding the Nazi ideology and the particular purpose of dissemi- nating antisemitism among the German people. So, what is this analysis? Why did Klemperer and his wife stay in Germany instead of leaving the country as most Jews did? To answer these questions, it is important to know more about him. * University of Sao Paulo. 1 Published about the Jewish Emancipation in the German magazine Sulamith in 1811. 2 Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich: LTI, Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook, translated by Martin Brady (London, Continuum 2002) p. 15 (hereinafter, LTI.). 3 According to the Brockhaus Encyclopedia of 1925. 4 Vossler was a contemporary of the Italian philosopher, historian, and politician Benedetto Croce, with whom he maintained close cultural contact. 327 © Miriam Oelsner, 2013 | doi 10.1163/9789004265561_031 Miriam Oelsner - 9789004265561 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NCDownloaded 4.0 license. from Brill.com09/24/2021 02:51:27PM via free access 328 MIRIAM OELSNER 2. ABOUT VICTOR KLEMPERER Klemperer was a true representative of the dream of so many Jews, ever since the Jewish Emancipation was promoted in Germany by Moses Mendelssohn at the end of the 18th century, to be accepted by the German society. This had also been the dream of his parents, for whom he was the ninth and last child. As emigrants from the Prague ghetto, they settled down in Breslau, now Wroclaw (Poland), where his father, Wilhelm Klemperer, earned a doctorate in Jewish philosophy and theology. He became a rabbi, initially in small communities and ultimately at the Reformist Synagogue in Berlin. It is therefore not entirely surprising that three of his four sons converted to Lutheranism, taking into account that the Reformist ritual was relatively close to Lutheranism. His four daughters did not have enough autonomy for attitudes of this kind. Nevertheless, Klemperer’s mother is known to have been fairly advanced for her times as far as her Bildung (cultural education) was concerned. The whole family had the burning wish to be a part of the German society. They craved a kind of Jewish-German syncretism, associated with the concept of Bildung expressed by the German Jewish poets and writers Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) and Berthold Auer- bach (1812-1882). According to George Lachmann Mosse (1918-2001), the German Jews’ search for Bildung was related to a search for a personal identity beyond the boundaries of religion and nationality.5 The new ways of thinking about and organizing society represented a rupture with the traditional Jewish concept of a “nation in exile,” insofar as they would make it possible to include the Jews in the German nation. Berthold Auerbach used to say that “the old religious life started from Revelation, whereas the new one would start from Bildung.” Victor Klemperer had a strong connection to the spirit of the French Revolution, the Century of Lights, and the ideas of liberté, égalite, fraternité, which led his professional life toward the Latin letters, of which he became a full professor at the University of Dres- den in 1920. He lost this position in 1935 upon the advent of the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws. Given his domestic environment, which was devoted to modernity and primarily oriented toward the aforementioned concept of Bildung, Klemperer avoided any contact with National Socialism, with its retrograde and racist mentality. He saw it as an exoge- nous epidemic that would be unable to survive in “his” Germany. Nazism was a perfect combination of a diabolical rationality at the service of the utmost irrationality. National Socialism grew stronger and stronger before people’s very eyes, at the same time as it promoted the full-scale destruction of the incipient yet already decadent Weimar Republic. A great part of the German population did not accept the Weimar Republic, as they were nostalgic for the power of the Empire and the assumed protection of the Kaiser. Even after reading Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Klemperer was unable to believe that “his” Germany would let itself be infected by the virus of fascist totalitarian- ism. In his posthumous book Geschichte eines Deutschen,6 Sebastian Haffner explains that it was inevitable that some false messiahs would appear at the height of German hyper- 5 George L. Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism (Cincinnati, Hebrew Union College Press 1985) p. 2. 6 Sebastian Haffner, Geschichte eines Deutschen (A German’s Story), 8th ed. (München, Deutsche Verlags Anstallt 2001). Miriam Oelsner - 9789004265561 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 02:51:27PM via free access ANTISEMITISM ACCORDING TO VICTOR KLEMPERER 329 inflation. Hitler was only one of them. That explains why he was initially not taken seriously when Mein Kampf, the only book he ever wrote, was published in 1925, expos- ing his racist and antisemitic way of thinking. The foundations of nationalist, racist, and totalitarian thinking aimed at preserving the “purity of Northern Aryan blood” against the “Jewish Bolshevist democratic interna- tionalism” date back to this period, which marked the beginning of the struggle between the Übermensch (the Aryan) and the Untermensch (the inferior Jew). Klemperer and his wife Eva Schlemmer, a Lutheran pianist, chose not to leave Ger- many despite the increasing Nazi influence. A great number of university professors joined Hitlerism. Klemperer’s professional environment became extremely dark. His brother George, a famous doctor, and his cousin Otto, the famous maestro, emigrated from Germany to the United States in the early 1930s, while Victor Klemperer was eventually forced into confinement at Dresden during the twelve years of terror from 1933 to 1945. He was first allowed to stay in his home, but from 1940 onward he had to stay in one of the three well-known Judenhäuser (Jews’ houses). He stayed there until February 1945, when Dresden was bombed by the Allies, which miraculously and paradoxically made it easier for the Klemperers to escape. They therefore survived the Shoah, just like his “Diaries,” which had been hidden thanks to his wife’s courage. She had entrusted them for safekeeping to the equally brave Dr. Annemarie Köhler, a doctor with whom they were friends. According to Peter Gay, Klemperer is one of the most important German diarists. His notes on the Nazi period are one of the fundamental documents of the testimonial literature, as Elie Wiesel described it. In the immediate aftermath of the war, he was asked by a Dresden editor to publish them, yet he chose to write a new book in which he would present testimony on everything he had experienced from the viewpoint of the professor, the educator, the sociopolitical analyst, the philologist, the etymologist, the historian, the thinker, the philosopher, the Jew persecuted by racism, and, finally, the “survivor.” Klemperer was aware of the fact that this book would be the first step in his attempt to understand what this terrible, malignant phenomenon called Nazism had been. His basic question was whether the roots of Nazism could have been truly Ger- man, as shown by his analysis in Chapter 21: “German Roots” of the book. He also wondered about the role of fanaticism and the fundamental role played by the Jews with regard to Nazism, as he explains in Chapter 26: “The Jewish War”: The Jew is the most important person in Hitler’s state: he is the best known Turk’s head of folk history and the popular scapegoat, the most plausible adversary, the most obvious common denominator, the most likely brackets around the most diverse of factors. Had the Führer really achieved his aim of exterminating all the Jews, he would have had to invent new ones, because without the Jewish devil—“anyone who doesn’t know the Jew doesn’t know the devil”—without the swarthy Jew, there would never have been the radiant figure of the Nordic Teuton.7 Klemperer’s “Diaries” were only published after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1995. The book Klemperer published in Berlin in 1947, LTI—Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen, based on his “Diaries” written during the Nazi period, attracted little 7 Klemperer, LTI, supra note 2, at p.