MONTREAL REVIEW | BOOK REVIEW

APRIL, 2010

Aware of the wondrous

The diary genre has specific qualities that distinguish it from all other literary forms. It is the most honest genre, especially if the diarist had no intention to disclose his thoughts and feelings to the public. The reader of a diary always appraises the intimacy and spontaneity of the writer, and joins a journey in which both author and reader do not know how it would end.

Victor Klemperer's diary is special. A tale about the days and the troubles of a German Jew, married to an "Aryan" woman, at the climax of the Second World War. There are not so much written documents left after people suffering from oppression and terror. Years ago, I read another diary - more popular than Klemperer's - that opened my eyes for the world in which I lived. It helped me to understand that not everything in human behaviour is a result of rational motivation. I read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago". I was twenty years old, serving in the Bulgarian army that in 1990 was still compulsory, a fully preserved from the communist era oppressive structure. At that time I was perplexed by the irrational and hard life in Section 36 250, the so-called " kashimeria " (this is a military jargon, it means, "Land forces" with particularly tough regime) located at the outskirts of city of Dobrich. It was a difficult time for me. I was indignant at the violence that officers and old soldiers exercised over the rookies. When I left Section 36 250 after a year and a half of military service with total 3 weeks furlough, I knew two things. The first was that I would never voluntarily permit to be treated as a slave and I would always value my freedom, freedom, and dignity of others. And the second thing was the realization that for some noble reason people create institutions - states, companies, churches, armies, universities, - but these institutions are exposed to the risk to lose their initial goals if people look at them only as means for personal advance and profit. With the passing of the time human institutions, I thought and still think, tend to lose their flexibility and "human face", they become bureaucracies, administrative hierarchies, and finally turn into monstrous machines that have their own life, following their own soulless logic and suppressing individuals and communities - the very reason and forgotten end goal for their existence. Examples for such degradation are the totalitarian states, the corrupted Churches, the monopolistic companies, and even some educational institutions (The need for Socrates and Francis Bacon is always alive!). 

Solzhenitsyn's Gulag opened my eyes to the fact that the Bulgarian army during the communist era and immediately afterwards did not intend to make us soldiers - people who would defend the motherland from external enemies, - but obedient subjects of a totalitarian state that would fight against the "enemy within". The compulsory military service was a kind of house of correction for strong, healthy and young men. There the "sons" had the "chance" to see the frontiers of their dreams and audacity; there they learnt how to submit and how to sacrifice their freethinking. The Army, as I saw it and experienced it, was an empty shell - a relic from the past that lost and perverted its initial goals. Two or three years after the end of my military service, the Bulgarian government started big restructuring of the military forces to prepare the country for NATO membership. 36 250 was closed. Recently I read in the newspaper that the Section buildings and the surrounding areas had been sold and prepared for rebuilding into residential homes for seniors. It seems that the good is always triumphant, despite the apparent hopelessness in times of unreason and hardship.

After serving as a decorated captain in the Soviet Army during World War II, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was sentenced to prison for eight years for criticizing Stalin and the Soviet government in private letters. Solzhenitsyn vaulted from unknown schoolteacher to internationally famous writer in 1962 with the publication of his novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich ; he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968. The writer's increasingly vocal opposition to the regime resulted in another arrest, a charge of treason, and expulsion from the USSR in 1974, the year The Gulag Archipelago , his epic history of the Soviet prison system, first appeared in the West. For eighteen years, he and his family lived in Vermont. In 1994 he returned to Russia. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died at his home in Moscow in 2008.

But let's return to Klemperer's diary. It reminded me, once again, about the same old truth that people often fall under the yoke of manmade organizations and socio-political structures. In Klemperer's case, that was the Nazi state that was an oppressor and killer. The Nazi party was a soulless organization, using on the one hand rationalistic mechanisms of bureaucracy and government, and following on the other hand, an insane, totally detached from the reality ideology. (In Solzhenitsyn, the monster was the Soviet Russia and the Communist party.)

Klemperer's diary describes a fantastic world where absurdity was institutionalized. Klemperer was from the "lucky ones," the Jews who were married to "Arian" women and were converted into Christianity. Despite that, Klemperer was not safe, and perhaps would finish in concentration camp if the Germans won the war. I do not want to re-tell his story; I will only summarize some of the facts that today are generally known. These facts can be easily found in many schoolbooks, but neither the schoolbooks, nor I, are able to transfer to the reader the feeling of dark reality that Jews in Nazi Germany felt. Reading victims' diaries and letters is the best way to learn and experience (of course still partially) the hardships, fears and absurdity of the life of the Jews in the Third Reich.

In 1942, Klemperer was a university professor in his sixties, a protestant and a veteran from the First World War. He was more a German than a Jew. He wrote his diary risking his life. In 1942 in Germany the Jews were sent in concentration camps for "crimes" such as possession of bottles of wine in their basements or hiding of jars with strawberry jam. During the war, Klemperer spent his days as many other Jews - in misery, starvation and constant expectation for imprisonment. He followed the absurd instructions of the Nazi bureaucracy, he participated in the compulsory work (shovelling snow near the University where, before the war, he used to work), and he was restricted to use public transport, to go shopping, or to attend theatres (activities that had been gradually regulated by the Nazis after 1933with the Nuremberg Laws and the policy of Gleichschaltung). With the advance of the time, Klemperer lost all civil freedoms and property. He was a witness of the forced labour of his fellow Jews, he wrote about the rumours for the death camps, his Jewish friends and acquaints were tortured with house searches and beatings, sent to prison, and some of them, in desperation, committed suicides. Klemperer documented an amazing terror and insanity, an organized and cold-bloodily executed crime. It is surprising that even in these dark days his hope never died: "Germany will nevertheless lose the war, but when?" (p.12, p. 209 in Course pack). Yes, this is an example of the good things that we can find in the diaries; they show us how man survives - his despairs and hopes, - how the reason and hope mysteriously does not leave us even in our darkest moments.

	This second volume of Klemperer's diary of the Nazi years confirms its place alongside Anne Frank's diary and Elie Wiesel's Night in the pantheon of Holocaust literature. Yet in many ways it is a more valuable source for the historian and general reader, as Klemperer gives the most finely detailed and intricately delineated portrait of the Nazi era for the man-in-the-street.

"It is said, children still have a sense of wonder," writes Klemperer at the beginning of his tale, "later one becomes blunted. - Nonsense. A child takes things for granted, and most people get no further; only an old person, who thinks, is aware of the wondrous."

People in their daily routine, preoccupied with problems and goals, rarely stop for a moment to ask the question "Why?" They accept the world as it is and do not ask why is it as it is. "Why?" is a difficult question that not always has an easy answer. It requires awareness not only of the wondrous, but of what is moral and good. We sometimes consciously avoid this question. It often endangers our survival, because it opens the doors for the general truths and personal motives . Usually "Why?" is victim's question. People with "normal" lives do not like it. It makes them insecure, rebellious, lonely...

Why did Holocaust and anti-Semitism happen? Why did so many people participate in the crime as blind, deaf and mute witnesses? Why do people organize to suppress other people? Why are we so often indifferent to the evil? How would I behave if I were in the situation of the Germans in the 1930s? Did Germans know about the atrocities and how would they act if they knew?

I like the answer of Yehuda Bauer. In "Rethinking the Holocaust", he argues that Nazi Germany and the behaviour of the Nazis was not "inhuman," it was only too human, "it was evil, but not inhuman." (p. 21; course pack p. 247). To understand what Bauer says, and to learn how to ask "Why" and how to find the right answers, we should read. We should experience and read a lot, and Klemperer's diary is one of the readings that, in my opinion, deserve attention.

***

Dear Reader, if you wish to comment this article please feel free to write to themontrealreview@gmail.com

All comments, opinions and suggestions will be published within a week after their submission.

All letters should include your name.