The Lesser Evil: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer, 1945-1959

New
Abridged
2004
$12.76

The third and final volume of the diaries of Victor Klemperer, a Jew in Dresden who survived the war and whose diaries have been hailed as one of the 20th century's most important chronicles. This volume opens in 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 is made a professor in Greifswald, then in Berlin and Halle. His wife Eva dies in 1951 but within a year at the age of 70 he marries one of his students, an unlikely but successful love-match. 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 diaries so fascinating. 'Klemperer was a shrewd judge of human nature and unsparing of his own. As a diarist he is in the Pepys class...' (Norman Lebrecht, Spectator)

Synopsis

The third and final volume of the diaries of Victor Klemperer, a Jew in Dresden who survived the war and whose diaries have been hailed as one of the 20th century's most important chronicles. This volume opens in 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 is made a professor in Greifswald, then in Berlin and Halle. His wife Eva dies in 1951 but within a year at the age of 70 he marries one of his students, an unlikely but successful love-match. 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 diaries so fascinating. 'Klemperer was a shrewd judge of human nature and unsparing of his own. As a diarist he is in the Pepys class...' (Norman Lebrecht, Spectator)

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More Information

Format: Abridged
Pages: 656
Edition: New Ed
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Published: 03 Jun 2004
ISBN 10: 0753817942
ISBN 13: 9780753817940
Book Overview: The third and final volume of the diaries of Victor Klemperer, a Jew in Dresden who survived the war and whose diaries have been hailed as one of the 20th century's most important chronicles.

Media Reviews

Klemperer's diary deserves to rank alongside that of Anne Frank.
The third and final volume of the diaries of Victor Klemperer, Dresden Jew and Holocaust survivor, whose 1933 45 diaries have already been hailed as one of the 20th century s most important chronicles.

Author Bio

Born in 1881, Victor Klemperer studied in Munich, Geneva and Paris. He served in the German Army in the First World War and was decorated. He was a professor in Dresden until he was dismissed as a result of Nazi laws in 1935. He survived the Holocaust and the war, and taught again as an academic until his death in 1960. Martin Chalmers, the translator of the first two volumes, has also translated this volume.