Victor Klemperer collected the material for this analysis of NS-Sprache in his diaries and notebooks throughout the twelve year trajectory of the Third Reich. His observational powers are astounding, as readers of his diaries can attest, but it is in this study that his cool, detached intellect distills the essence of Nazism and the elaboration of its linguistic forms. The work is enriched by its erudition and references. It is an essential resource for the student of Nazi society. Though it has appeared in many other German language editions, this edition, for the combination of the original text with helpful annotations by the translator, is particularly useful.

Klemperer's LTI remains a key work in understanding the development of language within the Third Reich. Klemperer wrote this text in 1946 from notes he had made in his diary during the entire Nazi era. While teaching in Dresden after the war, he realized that he had to reclaim the word "heroic" from its Nazi misuse if he hoped to ever be able to discuss the self-sacrificial aspect of heroism with his students. This realization led him to put together this compact study of how common words, such as "asphalt," can come to carry Goebbel's intended meanings. Asphalt comes to symbolize that which separates Germans from "Boden," and is what makes the inhabitants of the big city infertile and likely to vote Social Democratic. Klemperer's title, LTI, is composed of the initials of the Latin for "Language of the Third Reich", Lingua Tertii Imperii. "LTI" is the code that Klemperer used in his diary to mark examples of Nazi and Nazi-influenced language.

...this is an extraordinary book in any number of ways, and ought to be widely read....it's a book that almost anyone could read profitably, even many times. It's complexity is quite astonishing, but it's not the sort of complexity that is off-putting. In fact, it is so well written, so well organized, that it's complexity is almost unnoticeable. Still, it is a confession as well as an indictment, autobiography as well as analysis, cooly restrained and deeply moving often in the same paragraph. It is objective while being prfoundly personal. It wears it's Jewish spectacles (a phrase from the book) very lightly indeed.... More often it is wryly funny. It is its own evidence of the degree of assimilation (and blindness to the terror that was being prepared for them) of educated Jews in Germany prior to the rise of Nazism. It further substantiates, from a different angle, Arendt's famous insights into Nazi behavior. It contains in its preface an extraordinary statement of love, which, once read, informs the entire book. It is heartbreaking without once being sentimental. Indeed, it is heartbreaking in part because it resists the sentimental....

A professor recommended this book by Victor Klemperer to me several years ago, before his 1933-45 Tagebücher were translated into English by Martin Chalmers. At the time, my apprentice German was not equal to the work in the original language, and I read it in its French translation, ably translated by Elisabeth Guillot. I have since reread it in German, and, on publication, read this English edition. As far as I can tell, Martin Brady has done a masterful job of rendering Klemperer's informal and easily parsed style into addictably readable English. Before his career in the academy, Klemperer was a journalist, and in all of his writing, this tone prevailed.

Klemperer wrote his "LTI: Notizbuch eines Philologen" in 1945 and 1946, mostly from notes he kept in the diaries that later became the wildly successful "Ich will zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten" (I Will Bear Witness). He carried on his work despite the danger, and with an impressive amount of conscious objectivity. The work is an excellent, if impressionistic, study of the modes of Nazi language and their development in popular speech and culture. I would emphasize the _impressionism_ that colors this work, because Klemperer was only able to study a limited amount of presently accessible material; most of his work is based on the editions of newspapers, leaflets, and books that fell into his hands in Dresden during the war. He was a Jew in the Third Reich, and banned from possessing books written by "Aryan" authors. As well, over the course of the war the restrictions on Jews listening to radios, reading newspapers, and even talking in public became too great for Klemperer to realize any truly comprehensive study.

I do not wish to seem like I am condemning the man with faint praise: Klemperer wrote the first postwar study of Nazi language and linked it directly with the operation of the regime. Subsequent researchers have borne out Klemperer's thesis: the euphemisms and barbarisms in the Nazi tongue exerted a considerable influence on popular culture and personal expression. It is not necessary to go back to the Forties to find this influence - it exists today in modern German. The contemporary quibbles over such words as "ausrotten" or "endlösung" mask the considerable reformation of German that occurred during the Third Reich.

Students of twentieth century history cannot ignore this book. It is a must read.

As a Jewish American born after World War 2 with no knowledge of any family members who lived in Europe during the holocaust I have nonetheless always been fascinated with those times. As a college student I worked in a resort hotel where I met German Jewish survivors. To this day what struck me most was what one such survivor told me when I asked him what he remembered of his childhood in Germany. He told me it was just like being in America. German cities were modernized. Jewish people participated in civic life with small attention paid to their heritage unless they wished otherwise. Victor Klemperer's book "I Will Bear Witness," underscores what I had been told by that survivor. Life in Germany before January, 1933 was not, for Jews, particularly distinguishable from life for non-Jews. In fact, one might argue that the kinds of insidious prejudice rampant in the United States in the first half of this century were more virulent than that experienced in pre-Nazi Germany. The beauty of this book is how Professor Klemperer bears witness to the slow but relentless descent into hell by people who did not perceive themselves different from their countrymen. His descriptions of the day to day activities of paying taxes, arguing with the bureacracy over one's pension, and seeking out rationed foods bring to life the experience of those times. I must admit that I, like most Jewish Americans of my generation, view a Jewish person professing Protestantism somewhat uncharitably. And yet, the professor's consistent adherance to a world view in which one's ethnic background does not determine one's fate is quite palatable. Yet the fatal attraction of German culture, in this case, becomes the downfall of many German Jewish citizen. Perhaps we learn through this book and others like it that powerful forces of demagoguery once unleased may render even the most apparently "enlightened" society into a middle ages horror.

Klemperer's diary provides an immediate, close-focus view of (in this volume) pre-war and (in the second) wartime Nazi Germany. He was a steady diarist, an intelligent, thinking man, and his dedication in maintaining his diary through months and years of deprivation and abuse was a profound gift to us all. After reading the facts concering Hitler's rise to power and its outcome, it is fascinating to see how these events were viewed by a German citizen and a Jew. Klemperer makes it clear that those with open eyes knew the evil of the Nazis from the first, so that claiming ignorance after the war is a poor excuse. On the other hand, he also shows how the Nazis consilidated their grip on power and played on the fears of the German people. I found it particularly interesting how successful the Nazis were at playing up the communist menace; how many times in Klemperer's diaries does someone state that the Nazis are tolerable because they are keeping out the communists, as though only those two choices were possible? It is the little tidbits such as this, the thoughts of the Germans, gentile and Jew, as they marched toward their doom, that makes Klemperer's diary so fascinating.

I was terrified by the world that Victor Klemperer brings to life in " I Will Bear Witness ". The diary is a day by day account of a slow descent into the bowels of Hell. In the beginning the reader is pulled into Klemperers mostly mundane day to day life. Klemperer was a well respected and much published professor of Romance Languages at the University of Dresden. As well he was a decorated veteran of World War I. Slowly, starting with Hitlers rise to power in 1933, his entire world is turned inside out. Day by day the situation becomes more strained. Year by year the situation becomes more dangerous. But the brave hearted Klemperers stay on in Germany because they are German and can imagine no other life. I was greatly moved by the scenes that were brought to life by Klemperer. The description of the first household search they were subjected to caused goose bumps to run up my spine. In addition, the narrative of his 8 day imprisonment ( cell 89 ) is in my opinion a classic that will belongs to the ages. His ability to to draw a picture and capture the mood of a situation was truly amazing. I cannot say enough about the courage of the Klemperers as they fought everyday to hold onto their dignity, pride and finally their lives. Thanks to the skill and courage of Professor Klemperer I now have, in some small way, an idea of what the day to day horror of Nazi Germany was like for the persecuted.

This book was not as fascinating as the first volume but on reflection, when one realizes the tremendous risk he took in maintaining this diary, one must be chilled and grateful to Victor Klemperer. The book makes one realize how slow the war dragged on for people suffering under Hitler, and what seemed like fast-moving events to me as a boy living thru the war seemed an eternity to Klemperer. One can endure the awfulness of the life he led only because we know he survived. These volumes by Klemperer should be read by anyone who wants to know what daily life in Germany by a Jew was like.

The second volume of the diaries of Victor Klemperer, a German Jew who lived through the war, starts in 1941. Victor Klemperer is married to an "Aryan" wife, Eva, which means that he is semi-privileged: he has to wear the star but he is not immediately transported to Theresienstad or Auschwitz. A lot of laws against the Jews are already in place (see the first volume), but the situation nevertheless gets worth all the time: Jews are not allowed to keep pets, so their long-time companion pet has to be put down, the rations get less and less, they have to move to smaller and smaller houses constantly and Klemperer is put to work shoveling snow, packing tea, making envelopes.

Klemperer describes the everyday worries in everyday life and that is what makes the book so fascinating and important: nobody can say "they did not know", because Klemperer knew that being sent to Theresienstad or Auschwitz was essentially a death sentence. What is also impressive to follow is that constant fear, tiredness or lack of food slowly numbs a person: when the famine begins, he complains a lot about food shortages and the bad quality of the potatoes, but when this goes on longer, the notes on the subject disappear.

In the beginning of February 1945 the last Jews get a notice to report for transport, but by a miracle they are saved: the same night Dresden is razed to the ground by the (in)famous bombardment, leading to a fascinating first-hand account of the experiences of a civilian in wartime.

Klemperer removes his star and then the 4-month trek by foot, ox-cart, milk bus and train through war-torn Germany starts: from Dresden they travel to an old servant of theirs some 10 kilometers away, then to an old friend in Falkenburg, on to Munich, where they have to travel extensively in the surroundings before they find a place to live. After the capitulation they decide to travel back to Dresden. This whole chapter gives an impressive insight into the life of ordinary Germans in the first half of 1945.

What is also impressive is the love for his wife Eva: he constantly worries about her, tries to protest her and does the little menial jobs in house. When they have to travel back to Dresden through after-war Germany, it is Eva, however, who leads the way and takes the decisions.

All in all a very important diary by a very afraid, but still courageous man.

Is 'extraordinary' a powerful enough word for this book?

On reading it, I almost couldn't believe that it was genuine...but no writer of fiction could have created something as extraordinary,(I've used the word again,) as this.

Klemperer was a Jew, who managed to survive the war living within Nazi Germany because he was married to a Christian woman & 'luckily' for us, he wrote EVERYTHING down. Every. Tiny. Detail.

A superbly intelligent & witty man. Sometimes these kinds of books are just fascinating as eye-witness accounts, but what's unusual about this, is the fact that this man could actually write AND SO well.

SO sad & frustrating that it wasn't published within his lifetime.

I can't say any more. I'll never be able to say enough.

Probably the most extraordinary eye-witness account about life in Nazi Germany available...NO!...that will EVER be available.

Definetely the most extraordinary, (yes, it IS the right word,) book I've personally EVER read.

I'm honoured in being able to recommend this to you.