To The Bitter End: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1942-45

Description

The international bestselling record of a German Jew in Nazi Germany. 'Deserves to stand beside the diary of Anne Frank as a day-to-day description of the sufferings of the victims of Hitler's evil regime' EVENING STANDARD 'Few English readers will fail to be moved as I was - ultimately to the point of tears' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'Packed with vivid observation, profound reflection ... they find hope, dignity and even tart humour in the jaws of hell' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY A sensation when first published, this is one of the most extraordinary documents of the Nazi period. The son of a rabbi, Klemperer was by 1933 a professor of languages in Dresden. Over the next decade he lost his job, his house and many of his friends, even his cat, as Jews were not allowed to own pets. Saved for much of the war from the Holocaust by his marriage to a gentile, he was able to escape in the aftermath of the Allied bombing of Dresden and survived the remaining months of the war in hiding. Throughout, Klemperer kept a diary, for a Jew in Nazi Germany a daring act in itself. This volume covers the period from the beginnings of the Holocaust to the end of the war, telling the story of Klemperer's increasing isolation, his near miraculous survival, his awareness of the development of the growing Holocaust as friends and associates disappeared, and his narrow escapes from deportation and the Dresden firebombing in 1945. Shocking and moving by turns, it is a remarkable and important document, as powerful and astonishing in its way as Anne Frank's classic.

Born in 1881, Victor Klemperer studied in Munich, Geneva and Paris. He was a journalist in Berlin, taught at the University of Naples and received a DSM during WWI as a volunteer in the German army. He was subsequently a professor of romance languages at the Dresden Technical College until he was dismissed as a consequence of Nazi laws in 1935. He survived the Holocaust and the war and taught again as an academic until his death in 1960.

The best written, most evocative, most observant record of daily life in the Third Reich * NEW YORK TIMES * It is a fascinating record which deserves to stand beside the diary of Anne Frank as a day-to-day description of the sufferings of the victims of Hitler's evil regime * EVENING STANDARD * Few English readers will fail to be moved as I was - ultimately to the point of tears * SUNDAY TELEGRAPH * Klemperer was a shrewd judge of human nature and unsparing of his own. As a diarist he is in the Pepys class ... He is, quite simply, the German of record * SPECTATOR * These are the day-to-day records ... of an unheroic man who showed, in keeping them, inconceivable courage -- Penelope Fitzgerald * TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT * These diaries constitute one of the most vital historical and human documents of their age. Packed with vivid observation, profound reflection ... they find hope, dignity and even tart humour in the jaws of hell * INDEPENDENT * Of all the books I have read on the subject, I find it hard to think of one which has taught me more * SUNDAY TELEGRAPH * A heroic diarist who has left an invaluable record of the Third Reich * INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY * This is a truly monumental work, destined to become a source book for anyone studying the Third Reich -- Eva Figes * HAMPSTEAD AND HIGHGATE EXPRESS * The diary's value, apart from the quality of its writing ... lies in its detailed narrative of the humiliations suffered by Jews ... That is the guiding spirit of this remarkable book * TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT * He has left an extraordinary historical document which in its own way is an invaluable contribution to an understanding not just of Jewish life under the Nazi regime, but of the whole German wartime experience * SUNDAY TRIBUNE *