Witness to History
The Lesser Evil: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1945-59
,
translated by Martin Chalmers (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 2003), 637 pages, L25
George W. Liebmann
I N R E V I E W
V
ictor Klemperer, an academic philologist and student of French literature,
is credited with having given us, in the two previously published
volumes of his diaries, the most vivid portrait of the Hitler era, 1933-
45. Though of Jewish heritage, he survived that time partly because of the
indulgence shown to veterans of the First World War, and the successful political
maneuverings of the non-Jewish wives of Jews. When this temporary
reprieve was revoked, he was spared shipment to Auschwitz only by managing
to escape with his wife in the confusion following the bombing of Dresden. His
diaries, with their vivid depiction of the gradual tightening of political screws
and changes in public opinion, are the longest
and most detailed depiction of Nazism to
appear in English. They are rivaled in insight,
so far as this reviewer has managed to discover,
only by two shorter works by persons
also standing in an exceptional relationship to
the regime, in their case as members of the
minor aristocracy: Marie Vassilnikov’s
Berlin
Diaries
(1998) and Friedrich Reck-
Malleczewen’s
Diary of a Man in Despair
(2000).
This third volume, on Klemperer’s fourteen
years after the war as an academic and
ornament of the East German Communist
regime, may be even more valuable than its
predecessors: its cinematographic equivalent is
Marcel Ophul’s great film about collaboration
in France,
The Sorrow and the Pity (1971).
K
lemperer’s book begins with a fleeting reference to the interregnum
between the collapse of the Hitler regime and the consolidation of
occupation, which resembled the utopian period of high political
involvement and local initiative that Hannah Arendt found to be a stage in
almost all revolutions, generally succeeded by lassitude, apathy, and the professionalization
of politics.
At the end of the war, Klemperer found himself transformed within weeks
from a hunted pariah into a man from whom recommendations and indulgences
were sought, recognized by the Russian occupiers as a “Victim of
Fascism.” From the outset, Klemperer feared that the privileges and positions
accorded the few remaining Jews would lead to a revival of antisemitism. Of
some thrusting fellow survivors, he observes, “Poor dears, adventurers,
declasses, no harmless angels to be sure, but in many respects decent and
open-hearted people.”
Klemperer saw in the Russian propaganda of the time an echo of “the language
of the Third Reich” on which he had written a treatise while in captivity.
When he chooses to join the Communist Party (KPD), having once called him-
One would eliminate contingencyfee
contracts between private attorneys
and state governments. These contracts
invite abuse because they create strong
financial incentives to sue unpopular
parties. Certain attorneys suing the
tobacco industry on behalf of state governments,
for example, received the
equivalent of $8,000 per hour, twentyfour
hours a day, seven days a week, for
forty-two months. The dissenting judge
on the panel that awarded the fees
summed up his reaction in one word:
“Incomprehensible!”
A final idea worth mentioning concerns
class-action lawsuits. If a citizen of
one state sues a citizen of another, the
plaintiff may file suit in federal court,
even if the claims are based on state law.
But if any citizen in a class-action lawsuit
is from the same state as any defendant,
federal courts are barred from hearing
state-law claims. Consequently, attorneys
for class-action plaintiffs usually have
many states to choose from when they
file suit. Normally, they always opt for
those known to be plaintiff-friendly.
That’s great for plaintiffs but bad for
justice. One congressional proposal would
transfer class-actions to federal court if
“any member of a proposed plaintiff class
is a citizen of a state different from any
defendant.” This proposal makes sense
and should be adopted if it can ever get
past the Democrats in Congress who are
beholden to the trial lawyers.
The bottom line is that there are
multiple ways to tweak the legal system
to make it operate closer to the way it
would if judges, lawyers, and juries were
more restrained. But all of these devices
are imperfect and artificial. Ultimately,
the proper functioning of any legal system
depends on the integrity of those
who work within it. When it fails, it is
because we as a people, we as a polity,
have not had the strength of character to
maintain the sense of personal responsibility
that is integral to “a system of laws
and not of men.”
Until individual responsibility is
resuscitated in the legal realm, the title
of the book that inspired this review puts
the matter succinctly. I pay. You pay. We
all pay.
David Lips
is a research fellow at the
Hudson Institute and a member of the
Indiana Bar. He has J.D. and M.B.A.
degrees from Duke University and was in
private practice for five years, specializing
in employment law and personal injury
litigation.
AMERICAN OUTLOOK
W I N T E R 2 0 0 4 73
I N R E V I E W
self a democrat, he considers that “the
KPD is needed.” “The Church so
shamefully let me down,” he says.
Seeking a position in the new society,
he declares a desire “to make some
contribution to the reconstruction of
my Fatherland. . . . No matter what
has happened to me, I do have no
other.” In his application to join the
party, he declares, “In my opinions
and as a voter, I have stood by the liberals
. . . without any alteration to this
inclination. . . . Only a very resolute
left-wing movement can get us out of
this calamity and prevent its return. . .
. Only in the KPD do I see the unambiguous
will to do so.”
Klemperer believes that a complete
purge of ex-Nazis is needed to
prevent a recrudescence of the regime
and of antisemitism. Recalling the
failures of the Weimar regime, he
reproaches the Communist Party for
not “proceeding determinedly enough
in [purging ex-Nazis who work in]
school posts and the civil service” and
favors exclusion not only of those
implicated in the concentration
camps, but of party officers, judges
and lawyers, and majors in the
Wehrmacht
, all of whom he considered
complicit in the crimes of the
regime.
Nonetheless, he is horrified by the
Soviet expulsions of Germans from
East Prussia, and by the looting of
industry by the Russians: “We shall
never get on our feet again, I shall get
a tiny salary or old-age pension, that
will be all. . . . I feel more divided than
ever. If I were not a Jew, I would put
myself in [the]
Freikorps [like the disillusioned
ex-soldiers who supported
right-wing military formations after
World War I].” Yet he remains fearful of
the Germans. “What will happen to us
few Jews if the Allies withdrew? . . . I
tend ever more to view East Germany
as a federal state of Soviet Russia.”
With regard to the original Russian
plan for the East German education
system, Klemperer is dismayed that
there is not enough emphasis on purging
the former teachers. He initially
favors the elimination of academically
selective schools to achieve this, noting
that “the educational standard will naturally
suffer as a result: this was the
lesser evil for the moment.” He was
soon to abandon this view.
Klemperer’s account of 1946
notes the beginnings of Sovietimposed
broadcast censorship and of
the summary carrying off of 10,000
scientific workers to Russia. By
January 1947, it is forbidden to
import newspapers into the Russian
zone of Berlin. “Cold, pain, hunger,
frost fills 95 percent of my thoughts. .
. . The inner vacillation between journalism
and scholarship the other 5
percent.” His academic self-confidence
is shaken by the appearance of literary
critic Erich Auerbach’s
Mimesis:
“He knows Latin, Medieval Latin, Old
French, Hebrew. . . . what would I have
been able to achieve if I possessed
such resources?”
H
e views the Russians as
“obliging and good-natured,
but industrially and organizationally
unable to cope.” Yet he maintains
a jaundiced view of West
Germany, where “denazifications [are]
the most popular article on the black
market.” He reminds himself: “Always
remember, you are a war profiteer,
you owe your successes solely to the
emptiness of the Eastern Zone.” He
deplores the departure West of the
intelligentsia, yet “I still believe that
[the Communist] cause regarded ideally
is the better one and regarded
practically is in the long term the winning
one.”
He finally receives a university
appointment, in East Germany’s
newest and smallest university, on the
Baltic coast at Greifswald. A promise
to him of decent housing is not kept,
and he and his wife survive a bitter
winter in a house with frozen pipes
during which he is unable to bathe
from October to April and in which a
case of scabies prevents him from
using the public baths. “There is no
life in Greifswald, we are buried
alive.”
He comments on the changing
manners and ethics of the time, in
which, because of the threat of currency
reform, the rule is, “Don’t accumulate
any money, just don’t give
away any material assets.” “All these
women, without men, on their own
feet, morally quite free, with their
trousers, their cigarettes, their children.
. . . If I could write novels!”
By 1948, he notes the predicament
of a student forced by the
Russian secret police to spy on fellow
students. “Our advice: wait and see.”
“The day the Russians withdraw,
we are dead people. . . . I do not
believe in the worth of the things I
espouse. To be sure, however, the idea
of Marxism is pure.” His doubts about
the regime are crystallizing: “a seaside
holiday with time to reflect is not the
thing for 66-year-olds with angina and
without religion . . . I shall not change
horses. I do not know whether they
possess the ultimate truth, and I certainly
do not know whether they will
win.” An obligatory course in
Marxism is introduced in place of the
former general philosophy course. By
this time, all trade in books with the
West is blocked. Nonetheless, he still
holds to the view that “we do not
need to throw out all the bourgeois
academics, but where someone seriously
impedes us, he has to go.”
Yet he is still clear-sighted about
changes in the East. “Now the word is
class-conscious
. Not quite as poisonous
[as race loyalty] but it does not have
anything to do with scholarship
either.” He notes the revival of academic
ceremony: “the revolution
appropriates tradition, the Soviet
Union glorifies Tsarism”; “No one conquers
anymore, everyone liberates;
the armies of the peoples’ democracies
do it, the partisans did it, the
West wants a crusade in order to liberate
the Balkans.”
He is made a member of the East
German parliament, but is shocked by
the end of the secret ballot at elections,
and he learns of mysterious disappearances
of people. He writes,
“Politicians . . . are an inferior species.
And politics eats its own children.
That’s what I thought too—and then
the devil Hitler came and got me. And
he’s not going to get me again.”
I
n 1951, at the age of 70,
Klemperer is made a professor of
Humboldt University in Berlin. His
wife, who had followed him into the
party, dies, and in the following year, he
falls in love with and marries one of his
students, who at twenty-five is barely a
third his age. Hadwig is a clear-sighted
young woman from a Catholic background;
his movement away from the
party begins to accelerate.
When he reaches his seventy-fifth
birthday, a large event for Germans,
he receives only two congratulatory
letters from the West, one of them
from France. “It is egoism, more than
anything else, that binds me to the
GDR. If the
Volkskammer really is the
supreme authority . . . what is the
party, what the central committee,
74
AMERICAN OUTLOOK W I N T E R 2 0 0 4
I N R E V I E W
what the Politburo, what Staliniculus
Ulbricht [a satiric reference to Walter
Ulbricht, the GDR’s leader from 1953-
1971]? And why the game with parties,
when only one rules—my temporarily
suppressed liberalism is
showing ever more strongly through
the layer of red make-up.”
To a priest who defends West
German chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s
Catholic policy of forgiveness to repentant
Nazis, he rejoins, “Your ethics is
also mine, except that I cannot apply
love thine enemy to bloodhounds.” He
continues to be obsessed by a possible
Nazi revival: “we cannot get rid of
Fascism, here in a somewhat more
Asian, in the West in a somewhat more
European form. In Bonn one is
allowed to be in opposition and gets
two or three years in prison; here one
absolutely has to keep one’s mouth
shut and gets ten years’ hard labour.”
He detects parallels with Nazism’s
“agitation against belief, youth initiation,
struggle against ideological coexistence.”
When the regime finally
abolished food rationing in 1958, he
notes that it was the last government
in Europe to do so. He repents once
having supported capital punishment
in the
Volkskammer.
He finally is granted a French visa,
and visits France and Italy with
Hadwig, finding them “a little threadbare,
filmed too often.” Because of his
memories of the world before 1914,
this trip was not the epiphany for him
that it was for Mikhail and Raisa
Gorbachev, who visited France and
Italy at about the same time.
Nonetheless, “I can no longer completely
reject [the free world]. Nor can
I ignore [Arthur] Koestler,” whose
anthology,
The God That Failed, by disillusioned
Communist writers,
appeared at about that time. “Is one
really a little more free there [in the
West]? Immoral in a different way to
make up for it.” He is also influenced
by “Catholic France, living, believed
Catholicism, against that, no communism
will make headway.”
Khrushchev’s exposure of Stalin’s
crimes Klemperer finds “quite dreadful
and disillusions me completely.” He
sees in the French Chamber of Deputies
“a bit more democracy than in our
state, where the parliament is completely
superfluous. . . . The whole
West-East split increasingly gets on my
nerves and in the long run the fact that
it also to some extent runs through my
own house cannot be ignored.”
In late 1958 Victor and Hadwig
visit China, an experience which both
breaks his health and ends his faith in
Communism. “In the course of the
afternoon it became clear to me that
Communism is equally suited to
pulling primitive peoples out of the
primeval mud and pushing civilized
peoples back into the primeval mud. In
the second case, it is not only stultifying
but debasing as well, in that in
every way it trains people to be hypocrite
. . . fully acknowledging the
prodigious achievements here I have
finally become an anti-Communist.”
This has seldom been better said.
E
qually penetrating are his and
Hadwig’s joint reflections on
Israel and the Arabs: “Today’s
refugee camps in Egypt, like those in
West Germany, were ‘conserved injustice,’
deliberately conserved as political
propaganda. Auschwitz is the very last
pit of hell. But the Jews [in Israel] are
in the penultimate circle of hell—precisely
as Jews they shouldn’t be there.”
In his last months, he asks: “Why
am I content with remaining silent and
am even afraid of disapproved silence?
For Hadwig’s sake. It is hardly likely
that I will be harmed. But if the
promised pension were taken away
from her?” He recalls that he once
found incomprehensible an article in a
Western newspaper declaring that “the
older [DDR] university teachers were
either idiots or had been bought—in
the case of Klemperer both were true.”
Victor Klemperer died in February
of 1960. It is a melancholy thought
that the tightening of the screws continued
for another thirty years, culminating
in a society of informers, the
most broken society in Eastern Europe
save Albania, whose end confirmed
Klemperer’s insight that the government
rested entirely on Russian bayonets.
He had not compromised his
teaching; by the end he had to resist
demands that he delete from his book
on eighteenth-century France the sentence,
“Rousseau would hardly have
agreed with Robespierre.” One of his
students found him warm and witty.
“Across his figure and his work there
lies like a shadow the gentle danger of
being forgotten. But anyone who has
ever read one of his texts, or even
experienced him in person, will find
this danger absurd and the shadow
barely perceptible.”
This is not the chronicle of a consciously
heroic figure, though in a way
Klemperer was one in that he retained
his independence of private judgment
and had an existential drive producing
the chronicle, written for the desk
drawer, that is his most significant monument.
He portrays himself as
Everyman, buffeted by idealism and
opportunism, the instinct for survival
and the instinct for distinction, the desire
for revenge and that for a better world.
There are some very contemporary
lessons in this book. First is the
capacity of individuals to accept and
tolerate incursions on their liberty
when they are introduced gradually, a
theme also of Klemperer’s first two
volumes. Second is the primacy of
means rather than ends in politics, a
point that Hadwig grasped instinctively
and Victor late, if at all. Third is
the extent to which fear of alien rule
can transcend material self-interest, a
lesson we are today relearning in Iraq.
Fourth is the folly of economic and cultural
boycotts, of losing sight of the
fact that disapproved states are inhabited
by a myriad of diverse individuals,
like the Gorbachevs and Klemperers,
whose perceptions of the world will
influence the future of politics. Fifth is
the importance of appreciating the
mixture of motives from which all people
act, an appreciation which carries
with it the insight once voiced by Chief
Justice Hughes, a view which rejects
the pretensions of “nation-builders”:
There is no lack of schemes for
the regeneration of society,
schemes not infrequently of a
sort which would not be needed
by a society capable of freely
adopting them. The construction
of a theoretical paradise is the
easiest of human efforts. The
familiar method is to establish
the perfect or almost perfect
state, and then to fashion human
beings to fit it. This is a far
lighter undertaking than the necessary
and unspectacular task,
taking human nature as it is and
is likely to remain, of contriving
improvements that are workable.
Klemperer’s three volumes covering
twenty-six years are not the only
riches he has left for us. His muchpraised
autobiography covering the
years 1881-1918 and describing the
run-up to and effect of the First World
N R E V I E W
War is as yet unpublished in English; the same is true of his
diaries on the decomposition of German society during the
Weimar years, 1918-1932. The third volume of his diaries,
like its predecessors, is ably translated and accompanied by
exhaustive but unobtrusive endnotes. Only one criticism is
in order. Although Dr. Hadwig Klemperer is credited in the
second volume with deciphering the diaries and preparing a
typescript, no small task, since all three volumes in English
are abridgements, we are not told what became of her; if living,
she would today be about seventy-five years of age.
George W. Liebmann
, a Baltimore lawyer and recently a
Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge, is the author of
Solving Problems Without Large Government: Devolution,
Fairness and Equality
(Praeger, 2000) and Six Lost Leaders:
Prophets of Civil Society
(Lexington Books, 2001).
