A publishing sensation in Germany (where they have sold over 100,000 copies at 45), the publication of Victor Klemperer's diaries brings to light 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, like other German Jews, lost his job, his house and many of his friends, even his cat, as Jews were not allowed to own pets. Throughout, he, like so many other German Jews, 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, for a Jew in Nazi Germany a daring act ion itself. Shocking and moving by turns, it is a remarkable and important document, as powerful and astonishing in its way as Anne Frank's classic. This edition combines both volumes of his diaries, together forming the complete set.
They cover the period from Hitler's election to the beginnings of the Holocaust, to the end of the war. They tell 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.
- ISBN10 1842120220
- ISBN13 9781842120224
- Publish Date 6 April 2000
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 19 November 2006
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Orion Publishing Co
- Imprint Weidenfeld & Nicolson History
- Edition New edition
- Format Paperback
- Pages 1072
- Language English