I Shall Bear Witness

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 REVIEWThe 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.

This is a classic ... Klemperer's diary deserves to rank alongside that of Anne Frank's ... These diaries are certain to become not only the main primary source for historians of the Nazi period, but also an essential read for anyone who wishes to understand what it was like to be a Jew living in Germany during the 1930s. But perhaps it is even more than that ... Read this wonderful book and judge for yourself, I can't remember when I read a more engrossing book, This extraordinary book describes in detail, and with unparalleled force and clarity, what it was like to live in Germany under Nazism. The historical record is very much the richer for it, It is not the horror of the Holocaust we see here, but the subtle, barely discernible corruption of daily life, Authoritative ... Victor Klemperer's detailed eye-witness chronicle, not dissimilar in its cumulative power to Primo Levi's, is a devastating account of man's inhumanity to man

Born in 1881, Victor Klemperer studied in Munich, Geneva and Paris. He was a journalist in Berlin, taught at the University of Naples and received a DSM during WWI as a volunteer in the German army. He was subsequently a professor of romance languages at the Dresden Technical College until he was dismissed as a consequence of Nazi laws in 1935. He survived the Holocaust and the war and taught again as an academic until his death in 1960.