Quotes from Victor Klemperer

To me the Zionists, who want to go back to the Jewish state of A.D. 70 (destruction of Jerusalem by Titus) are just as offensive as the Nazis. With their nosing after blood, their ancient cultural roots, their partly canting, partly obtuse winding back of the world they are altogether a match for the National Socialists. That is the fantastic thing about the National Socialists, that they simultaneously share in a community of ideas with Soviet Russia and with Zion.

Academics love the semicolon; their hankering after logic demands a division which is more emphatic than a comma, but not quite as absolute a demarcation as a full stop.

Ich war noch nicht ein bißchen abgestumpft, ich war noch so ganz gewohnt, in einem Rechtsstaat zu leben, daß ich damals vieles für die tiefste Hölle hielt, was ich später höchstens für ihren Vorhof, für den Danteschen Limbo nahm. Immerhin: soviel schlimmer es auch kommen sollte, alles, was sich noch später an Gesinnung, an Tat und Sprache des Nazismus hinzufand, das zeichnet sich in seinen Ansätzen schon in diesen ersten Monaten ab.

Always the same seesaw. The fear that my scribbling could get me put into a concentration camp. The feeling that it is my duty to write, that it is my life's task, my calling. The feeling of vanitas vanitatum, that my scribbling is worthless. In the end I go on writing anyway, the diary, the Curriculum.

That is the fantastic thing about the National Socialists, that they simultaneously share in a community of ideas with Soviet Russia and with Zion.

Curious: At the very moment modern technology annuls all frontiers and distances (flying, wireless, television, economic interdependance), the most extreme nationalism is raging.

In the war I was subject to military law, but subject to law nevertheless; now I am at the mercy of an arbitrary power.

Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all.

The dominant feeling is that this reign of terror can hardly last long, but that its fall will bury us.

Their opinion: If at the cost of going backwards internally, he restores Germany's power externally, then this cost is worth while. Conditions at home can always be made good later – politics is just not a clean business. [. . .]

I changed Lessing's35 words – Anyone who does not lose his reason over certain things, has no reason – into: Anyone whose heart remains calm today, has no heart.

Pity is such a shabby thing. I can torment myself with wanting to feel pity, and yet I don't succeed.

Worte können sein wie winzige Arsendosen: sie werden unbemerkt verschluckt, sie scheinen keine Wirkung zu tun, und nach einiger Zeit ist die Giftwirkung doch da.

Antisemitismus als soziale, als religiös und wirtschaftlich begründete Abneigung ist zu allen Zeiten und in allen Völkern, bald hier, bald dort, bald schwächer, bald stärker, aufgetreten; ihn an sich gerade den Deutschen und ihnen allein zuzurechnen, wäre durchaus ungerecht.

That the door fell shut, that the latch fell into place, did I know it with a nameless fear. At that second the eight days turned into 192 hours, empty caged hours.

Head held high for the difficult last five minutes!

I am slowly giving up hope of politics; Hitler is after all the Chosen One of his people. I do not believe that he is in the least bit shaky, I am slowly beginning to think that his regime can really still last for decades. There is so much lethargy in the German people and so much immorality and above all so much stupidity.

I am German forever, German 'nationalist'. The nazis are un-German.

Newspapers are read differently now [. . .] Between the lines.

Very quiet and yet quieter living-for-ourselves.

the regional mental asylum. The SS is in charge. They have built a special crematorium. Those who are not wanted are taken up in a kind of police van.People here call it the whispering coach. The relatives receive the urn. Recently one family here received two urns at once. - We now have pure communism. But communism murders more honestly.

Socialism has now become completely or almost completely identical with Bolshevism; that

A generation has more in common, after all, than a nation, than a profession.

We are completely isolated. We have heard nothing from Annemarie Kohler, nothing from Johannes Kohler for weeks.......A frightening silence.