I Shall Bear Witness 

History never repeats exactly, but the patterns are often similar. With everyone now wildly speculating about the future and what’s to come, I look for inspiration to a voice from my birth country’s darkest times: Victor Klemperer. A month ago, I pull out the two hefty volumes of his diaries: I Will Bear Witness, the Nazi years 1933 – 1942, and 1942 – 1945. The German title is: Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten. The literal translation: I want to bear witness to the last.  To the last. Published in German in 1995, very good translation into English in 1998. Victor Klemperer (1881 – 1960) was a Jewish-born German literary scholar, a cousin of the famous conductor Otto Klemperer, married to Eva, an “Aryan” German, one of the factors that helped the couple to miraculously survive. After the war they settle back in Dresden, which is East Germany under Russian control in 1945. His diaries also survive. They are truly stunning.

Peter Gay ends his review for The New York Times Book Review with: “Yet we know that, brave as 'good Germans' might be, the lot of Germany's Jews, bad as it was, only grew worse. The deportations were beginning. Volume 2 of the diaries, which takes the Klemperers from January 1942 to the end of the war, takes up this part of the tale; as moving, as brilliant, as Volume 1, it is scheduled to appear in English next year. Together, they make Klemperer into one of the greatest diarists -- perhaps the greatest -- in the German language.”  

 

I agree. In mid-nineties, I devoured the two volumes in German, then again in English. It is hard to put these diaries down. If you want to know what it was like to live through a time like the Third Reich, how fascism and racism creep in slowly, insidiously, affecting all of ordinary daily life and the culture, then you must read these diaries. They will take you by surprise: Klemperer is not a hero, he is pedantic, honest, insightful, with ever-increasing devastating clarity. The entries go on week by week, month by month, year by year. It is painful to observe the slow moral erosion and brutalization of the culture, society and its citizens. We may ask ourselves: How can a dictatorship come about? By luck? By consent? What kind of person will we be? Choosing to look away? Careful with the judging. Over the past decade, I have started to cringe at my youthful arrogance of demanding resistance and moral courage in hindsight. What do we know. Look at us here in America. Since 2015, we helplessly have been witnessing the slow “creeping in” – despite an interlude – the accelerated erosion of decency, and the uninhibited show of brute force, shock and awe.

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Since early childhood I was thoroughly educated about Fascism and the Third Reich, the two world wars, the atrocities of war and Holocaust. All my life, I studied it, in search of how it was possible for the Holocaust to happen. Like many of us in Germany in 1968, I questioned, opposed, and accused the older generations: how could you let it happen? Finally, institutions were slowly democratized, old Nazis were fired from their posts, authoritarianism was fading. Coming to America in 1981, the question of how the Germans could let “it” happen – was now directed at me, age 28, sometimes multiple times a day. Many Americans are eager to condemn ordinary Germans, just as I was doing. Nowadays it is very eerie to watch American citizens behave very much like those ordinary German citizens back in the 1930’s. I became an American citizen at the best and the worst time: at my naturalization ceremony, a kind president gives a moving welcome speech to us from the screen. Being a citizen gives me more safety and human rights than being a resident alien (for 43 years). Though I intuit that in the future none of us will be safe.

Victor and Eva have a house, a car even. They barely can hold on to these luxuries because the university forces him to retire from his professorship, his writing not published anymore.  Over the years, they gradually are losing everything, including their privileges as an interracial couple, their freedom to move, their right be alive. Forced to wear the yellow star and live in squalid crowded quarters with other Jewish families. Just as they are about to be deported to Auschwitz, the allies fire bomb Dresden in February 1945.  By coincidence the Klemperers miss the firestorm, no deportations take place at the time of the disaster. As the war is winding down into postwar chaos, random killings and hunger, their weeks-long odyssey through Germany’s south turns most excruciating and surreal. And yet they survive.

 

For years now, I have been saying: “Very soon America might be politically where Germany was in 1933 or even 1938.”  This year our democratically elected leader and president, gladly posing like a vicious menace, will be coldly looking down at us from numerous official walls. Calculated, studied. The convicted criminal he is. A new regime is taking hold. It stands for fascism. Hitler did the same (it just looked and sounded a bit differently). It lasted 12 years. The consequences were very dire for his own people. And catastrophic for the world: mostly Jews were murdered, but also countless communists, socialists, Romani people, dissenters, intellectuals, disabled people, writers, artists, Poles, Russians, French and British citizens, on and on. Twelve years.

 

In 1938, Monday evening of January 31, Klemperer writes in a sober tone: “And with every day that passes I am again and ever more strongly disturbed by the trite antithesis; such tremendous things are being created, radio, airplane, sound film, and the most insane stupidity, primitiveness and bestiality cannot be eradicated – all invention results in murder and war.” Despite the couple’s serious shortage of money, they happen to go to the cinema twice that week. Klemperer describes in lively detail small events, encounters with people, personal despair or disappointments. And the little triumphs, a loaf of bread. His observational skills allow us to partake of ordinary life. The reader is pulled in. Life flows on. And all along the little joys of Kaffeeklatsch mingle with the sorrows of old friends’ suicides or disappearances abound.

 

On the cusp of our own unfolding tragedy (third reich?) here in America, we will have to witness – or refuse to notice – mass deportations, punishment and persecution of the “enemies within,” enrichment of a very few in power, ordinary people suffering chaos on many fronts, accelerated inequality and injustice, climate and environmental deterioration. How long will it last? The tide will turn eventually, but….  And really it’s not about the man (Führer) whatever their name, it is about a fascist backlash against the justice, human rights and environmental advances society has made. As always, a supreme megalomanic “entertainer” (demagogue) can exploit and capture the confused self-centered dissatisfactions of the people. So, in the end it is about us. What can we promise ourselves? For me, I envision to moving forward, staying true to myself, not looking away, helping as I can. Be of service. Be awake. Envision new possibilities. The Klemperers survive it all, like in a real-life fairytale: “Frau Glaser welcomes us with tears and kisses, she had thought us dead.” They manage to reclaim their house in Dölzschen (Dresden). Victor is reinstated at his university post at Leipzig University. In 1957, his important book about the language of the Third Reich (not available in English translation) is published. Beware of the “buzzwords” of our own new regime. Slowly becoming the land of fear….

The irony of Inauguration Day 2025 falling on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. A sad day. But both a truth of America. The best and the worst mingle. Freezing conditions will prevail in Washington DC. The fires in Los Angeles are ongoing. Some are losing their home, their work, others are spared. That’s how history traces its path. Still, we must grapple with the bigger patterns and societal consequences. Open doors for new roads. Our small little joys, we will still have them, no worries. This too we can learn from Victor Klemperer’s diaries. Babies are born, teeth are repaired, the car, the water heater, too. Some mornings it will be difficult to rise. Other days we go on despite…. Victor needed courage to keep writing in the later years, it put the couple in existential danger. Miraculously, the diaries are saved. They truly are a “stroke of resistance.” On May 27, 1942, Klemperer defiantly insists:

 

“I shall go on writing. That is my heroism.

I will bear witness, precise witness!” 

Sometimes I wonder, will I have courage when needed? When threatened with incarceration of loved ones or self? I don’t know. My teenage father’s refusal to stay quiet in the war had huge consequences, like a death sentence. Only extraordinary luck saved his life. The patterns of history. History and memory are good allies for navigating our way from the present into the future. The need for human awakening is part of the arc of evolution. Are we collectively open for new possibilities? Re-reading these courageous diaries from 70 to 90 years ago, I am very grateful for them. Inspiration to be awake.

And you?

 

Day two, the Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde courageously seizes the moment when she reminds the incoming president in the morning prayer ceremony at Washington’s National Cathedral of his duty as a leader to be merciful. "There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families, some who fear for their lives." Her plea is beautiful in tone, content and delivery. "The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals, they – they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation. But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors," says Budde, nodding, as to affirm her message. A Republican US Representative tweets that she “should be added to the deportation list.” This is then reported by the evening news as if it is ok, just another fact. Obviously, we all play a different part in history. Helpless and awake, may we at least spread small deeds of goodness.

 

https://www.npr.org/2025/01/21/nx-s1-5270031/bishop-confronts-trump-during-sermon-at-inaugural-prayer-service