Quotes from Victor Klemperer

We had a friendly conversation, the man shook my hand, told me to keep my spirits up........ The next day......He stared ahead as he went past, as much a stranger as possible. In his behaviour the man probably represents 79 million Germans.

They have over-cultivated national rhetoric [. . .] they will have to undertake something.

National Socialism adapts Fascism, Bolshevism, Americanism, works it all into Teutonic Romanticism.

I must make notes even now, I must, no matter how dangerous it is. That is my professional courage.

It is with a certain lethargy that I let everything take its course.

I only have the quite childish horror of the grave and of nothingness

Woorden kunnen nietige stukjes arsenicum zijn: ze worden ongemerkt ingeslikt en lijken geen uitwerking te hebben, maar na enige tijd is de gifwerking er toch.

Does one unceasingly talk about a thousand years and enemies destroyed, if one is certain of these thousand years and this annihilation?

They've made a peace treaty of their own', Eva used to say, when we passed an illuminated window. (In reference to the strict German laws on light blackouts.)

We hear a lot about Palestine now; it does not appeal to us. Anyone who goes there exchanges nationalism and narrowness for nationalism and narrowness.

No victorious revolution without an idea. Certainly! But just as certainly: It is not the idea which makes a revolution, but privation which causes it to break out. And once under way, it deviates from the idea.

I feel like Odysseus in Polyphemus's cave: "You will I eat last." To this Blumenfeld remarked on the telephone with a comforting quick wit: But Odysseus was not eaten, and it was Polyphemus who came to a bad end. […]

I am not a dictator, I have only simplified democracy.

The banal perception - all the most profound perceptions are banal, at most one man finds a somewhat more original expression for it than another man - that we know nothing at all except what we have experienced ourselves.

I believe the pogroms of November '38 made less impression on the nation than cutting the bar of chocolate for Christmas.

The never ending alarms, the never ending phrases, the never ending hanging out of flags, now in triumph, now in mourning—it all produces apathy. And everyone feels helpless, and everyone knows he is being lied to, and everyone is told what he has to believe

In a pharmacy toothpaste with a swastika. A mood of fear such as must have existed in France under the Jacobins. No one fears for their lives yet--but for bread and freedom.