Imprint
- W&N
Biography: general, Autobiography: historical, political & military, Diaries, letters & journals, Prose: non-fiction, The Holocaust, Second World War, Jewish studies
The superb, bestselling diaries of Victor Klemperer, a Jew in Dresden who survived the war - hailed as one of the 20th century's most important chronicles.
'Compulsive reading' LITERARY REVIEW 'Deeply engrossing' SPECTATORThe superb, bestselling diaries of Victor Klemperer, a Jew in Dresden who survived the war - hailed as one of the 20th century's most important chronicles.
'Compulsive reading' LITERARY REVIEW 'Deeply engrossing' SPECTATOR
'Klemperer's diary deserves to rank alongside that of Anne Frank' SUNDAY TIMES
'A vivid and powerful account of a remarkable life' SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY
June 1945. The immediate postwar period produces many shocks and revelations - some people have behaved better than Klemperer had believed, others much worse. His sharp observations are now turned on the East German Communist Party, which he himself joins, and he notes many similarities between Nazi and Communist behaviour. Politics, he comes to believe, is above all the choice of the "lesser evil". He serves in the GDR's People's Chamber and represents East German scholarship abroad. But it is the details of everyday life, and the honesty and directness, that make these bestselling diaries so fascinating.
More books by Victor Klemperer
Praise for The Lesser Evil: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1945-1959
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Together they sum up the horrors of this century, but also the persecuted humanity which endures - and in rare cases like this, survives - Antonia Fraser
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Books of the Century - SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
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These diaries constitute one of the most vital historical and human documents of their age - INDEPENDENT
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Compulsive reading ... Klemperer's diary also offers a superb window on life in Soviet-occupied Germany in 1945-9 and the early years of the German Democratic Republic - LITERARY REVIEW
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The enhance Victor Klemperer's rare standing as a truth-teller - IRISH TIMES
Victor Klemperer
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.
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