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    A Study Guide for Victor Klemperer's "I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years,1933-1945"
    A Study Guide for Victor Klemperer's "I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years,1933-1945"
    A Study Guide for Victor Klemperer's "I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years,1933-1945"
    Ebook46 pages31 minutes

    A Study Guide for Victor Klemperer's "I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years,1933-1945"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    A Study Guide for Victor Klemperer's "I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years,1933-1945," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Nonfiction Classics for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Nonfiction Classics for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 20, 2016
    ISBN9781535825535
    A Study Guide for Victor Klemperer's "I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years,1933-1945"

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      A Study Guide for Victor Klemperer's "I Will Bear Witness - Gale

      1

      I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941

      Victor Klemperer

      1995

      Introduction

      Victor Klemperer wrote his diaries during the twelve years of Hitler's rule. The English version of I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941 was published in New York by Random House in 1998 (with a second volume covering the years 1942-1945), but the diaries have an interesting history. After Klemperer's death in 1960, his diaries were taken to the Dresden State Library. Walter Nowojski, a former student of Klemperer's, found them and, recognizing their historical value, typed the handwritten diaries in German. Finally, a small Berlin publisher agreed in 1995 to publish the manuscripts in German as a single volume covering the years 1933 to 1945. Klemperer's diary quickly became a bestseller despite its length (1,500 pages) and price (well over sixty dollars).

      The diary is considered important as a detailed account of the spread of Nazism in Germany and the reception of Nazi ideals by the population. It represents the unusual perspective of a Jew throughout all twelve years of Nazi power. The diary's unique contribution to the field of Holocaust literature is its step-by-step presentation of the systematic dehumanization and persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany.

      Some readers focus on the fact that Klemperer knew Germans who were sympathetic to him as a Jew at a time when it was unpopular to be so. Others hold the diary up as evidence that the horrors of the Holocaust were widely known at the time, an issue that has been sharply debated over the years. Regardless of the reader's or scholar's interpretation of the diary, its important historical value is universally recognized.

      Author Biography

      Victor Klemperer was born October 9, 1881, in Landsberg-on-the-Warthe in the province of Brandenburg, Germany. Klemperer was the youngest in a family of three other brothers and four sisters. When Klemperer was nine, the family moved to Berlin, where his rabbi father, Wilhelm, was summoned to a liberal Reform Synagogue. As an unorthodox rabbi, Wilhelm was supportive of his four sons converting to the national religion, Lutheranism, in adulthood.

      Klemperer married a concert pianist named Eva in 1906. His brothers disapproved of the union because they thought Eva was their brother's social inferior. As for Eva's family, some of her relatives disapproved of her marrying a Jewish man. During World War I, he served as a cannoneer in the German army, earning a Distinguished Service Medal. This service, along with his marriage to an Aryan woman, protected him from deportation to the concentration camps that sealed the fates of millions of Jews during Hitler's rule.

      Upon returning from his service in World War I, Klemperer worked for a few years as a freelance journalist. In 1920, he accepted a position at Dresden Technical University as

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