Victor Klemperer

Victor Klemperer (9 October 1881 – 11 February 1960) was a German philologist and diarist. His journals, published posthumously in Germany in 1995, detailed his life under the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, the fascist Third Reich, and the German Democratic Republic.

Three volumes of his diaries have been published in English translations: I Shall Bear Witness, To the Bitter End, and The Lesser Evil. The first two, which cover the period of the Third Reich, have become standard sources and have been extensively quoted. His book LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen, published in English as The Language of the Third Reich, examined how Nazi propaganda co-opted and corrupted German words and expressions.

Klemperer was born in Landsberg an der Warthe (now Gorzów Wielkopolski, Poland) as the youngest child of a Jewish family. His parents were Wilhelm Klemperer, a rabbi, and Henriette née Frankel. Victor had three brothers (Georg, Felix, Berhold) and four sisters (Margarete, Hedwig, Marta, Valeska). His oldest brothers were physicians: Georg, 1865–1946, director of the hospital Berlin-Moabit (which treated Vladimir Lenin); Felix, 1866–1932, director of the hospital Berlin-Reinickendorf.

Victor was a cousin of the conductor Otto Klemperer, and first cousin once removed to Otto's son, the actor Werner Klemperer. In 1903 Klemperer converted to Protestantism for the first time, shortly thereafter returning to Judaism.

Victor Klemperer attended several gymnasia. He was a student of philosophy, Romance and German studies at universities in Munich, Geneva, Paris and Berlin from 1902 to 1905, and later worked as a journalist and writer in Berlin, until he resumed his studies in Munich from 1912.

Though not a religious man, Victor Klemperer needed a religious identity, as Jew, Christian or religious dissenter, to support his career in German academia of the time. He chose Christianity as being most compatible with his primary sense of identity as, simply, a German, and became baptised again in Berlin in 1912.

He completed his doctorate (on Montesquieu) in 1913.

Klemperer was habilitated under the supervision of Karl Vossler in 1914. From 1914 to 1915, he lectured at the University of Naples. He responded to the Italian entry into World War I by enlisting as a military volunteer in the Bavarian Army. From November 1915 to March 1916 he was deployed as an artilleryman on the Western Front in France. He was wounded and decorated for bravery by the Kingdom of Bavaria. After a recovery period in Germany, he served in the military censorship department of Prince Leopold of Bavaria's Ober Ost command in Kaunas and Leipzig.