Born in 1881, Victor Klemperer was a German academic of the old school—proud, dignified, intensely conscious of his high position in the social hierarchy, and convinced of the superiority of Germany to all other nations in the greatness of its culture and the enlightenment of its polity. A professor of philology at the Technical University of Dresden and the author of several scholarly books on French literature, Klemperer took pride in his work and reputation but for many years privately felt himself to be something of an underachiever compared to his oldest brother, Georg, a distinguished physician who served as the director of a major Berlin hospital, and to his renowned first cousin, the orchestra conductor Otto Klemperer (whose son, Werner, became famous in 1960s America for playing Colonel Klink on Hogan’s Heroes).
There is one more important detail about Victor Klemperer: he was half-Jewish—the son of a Reform rabbi. But this background meant little to him during the first five decades of his life, during which he converted to Protestantism, married a gentile pianist and musicologist named Eva Schlemmer, earned a doctorate in philology, and, after serving honorably in the First World War, entered upon his academic career.
His high professional status and half-gentile identity afforded him a degree of protection.
Then came Hitler, whose January 1933 installation as German chancellor occurs in the early pages of I Shall Bear Witness, the first of the three volumes of Klemperer’s monumental diaries,
