15 July 2019
De Gruyter is launching Klemperer Online, a database containing the complete and unabridged diaries of Victor Klemperer as transcripts and facsimiles of the handwritten pages. The texts all have commentary and the digital version of the diaries has more than 30 percent more content than the print edition. The complete collection of the diaries provides a more comprehensive, detailed and focused depiction of the decades that Klemperer documents.
Victor Klemperer (1881-1960) was a noted Romance Studies scholar and a professor at the Technical University of Dresden, from which he was dismissed in 1935 due to his Jewish origins. From 1945 to 1960, he held university positions in Greifswald, Halle and Berlin and published a large number of works on the history of Italian and French literature. His reputation was confirmed with the publications of 'LTI – Lingua tertii imperii', in which he analyses the degeneration of the German language during the Nazi period.
The early diaries from the period of the Weimar Republic give insight to Klemperer’s life and career as a professor of romance studies in Dresden. His descriptions of the rise of the National Socialists have earned him the reputation as a “cultural historian of the catastrophe”. Klemperer chronicles the deprivation of rights of Jewish citizens and describes day-to-day life under the Nazi regime in minute detail.
His diaries after 1945 confirm his strong desire for a radical new beginning both for himself and for Germany. These less well-known – and previously only partially published – diaries are an important testimony of the divided Germany, the early German Democratic Republic and Klemperer’s attitudes towards communism and Zionism.