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Biography
German

Victor Klemperer

1881 — 1960

German literary scholar and diarist whose posthumously published diaries — I Will Bear Witness (1995) — provide one of the most detailed and harrowing first-person accounts of Jewish life under the Nazi regime. Klemperer, a Protestant convert of Jewish descent, survived the war in Dresden and documented the incremental destruction of civil society. His study of Nazi language, LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii (1947), remains a foundational text in the analysis of totalitarian propaganda.

Past sales0
PeriodModernist
NationalityGerman
1. Biography

A short life of the author

Victor Klemperer (1881–1960) was a German literary scholar and diarist whose wartime journals, published as I Will Bear Witness (Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten, 1995), constitute one of the most extraordinary documents of the Holocaust era. A Protestant convert of Jewish ancestry, Klemperer survived the Nazi period in Dresden — protected somewhat by his marriage to a non-Jewish woman — and documented with meticulous precision the daily humiliations, terrors, and bureaucratic atrocities of life under the regime.

His earlier study LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii (The Language of the Third Reich, 1947) analyses how the Nazis corrupted the German language as a tool of propaganda and control. The book became a foundational text in the study of totalitarian language.

Collecting Klemperer

The German editions of Klemperer’s diaries (Aufbau-Verlag, 1995) and the English translations (I Will Bear Witness, Random House, 1998) are significant texts in Holocaust studies and memoir. LTI (1947) in first German edition is a scarce and valuable scholarly collectible.