Absolutely honest and utterly joyless
Rupert Christiansen
THE LESSER EVIL: THE DIARIES OF VICTOR KLEMPERER, 1945-59 edited by Martin Chalmers Weidenfeld, £25, pp. 637, ISBN 1842127438 In 1940, before the ultimate horror of Nazism had kicked in, Victor Klemperer reflected on his belief that 'it is necessary for Germany to start from the bottom again and learn the ABC of morality and culture and humanity anew'. Five years later, the war is over, and the ruined and defeated nation stands at just such a point of Stunde null — an end which is also a beginning.
It is here that the third and final volume of Klemperer's remarkable diaries opens. A literary academic of Jewish birth who converted to Protestantism, he had been brutally humiliated, robbed and bullied by the Third Reich. Only his Iron Cross, marriage to an Aryan and the bombing of Dresden (literally hours before he was due to receive a deportation order) saved him from extermination.
In June 1945 he and his wife return to their village home, which had survived the Russian onslaught almost unscathed. He is determined to pick up the pieces, 'No 20year-old can be half as hungry for life,' he writes. He is scarred, exhausted and embittered, but his garden is full of cherries and he has clung to his sanity and shreds of hope.
Over the ensuing months, he debates with himself the merits of joining the Communist KPD, the party which effectively controlled the sector in which he lived. A highly intelligent and thoughtful man, whose attitudes were basically those of an enlightened European liberal, he persuades himself that 'we could very well cultivate German culture as a Soviet state under Russian leadership' and that 'only a very resolute left-wing movement can get us out of the present calamity and prevent its return'. So he signs up, open-eyed and without fervour. 'One can only choose the lesser evil, it is impossible to make any pure decision.'
To us with hindsight, his choice may seem deplorably wrong-headed, but, as the diary's magnificent translator and editor Martin Chalmers points out, it was not clear in 1945 how draconian the division of Germany would be, nor that the Russian sector would become totalitarian. And Klemperer had been traumatised by 12 years of terrible suffering: what he craved was stability, and at the heart of his thinking was his belief that the Soviets were more rigorously anti-Nazi and anti-antiSemitic than the western powers — later he would snarl about 'the Nazism of Bonn' with 'its Jew-murdering ministers'. To the end, he would affirm that however tiresome and corrupt the East German regime became with 'its never-ending new direc tions inquiries, prohibitions what is done in the West is 1,000 x more odious still'. He is duly rewarded for not making trouble. He becomes a university professor, and wins prizes and medals. His books and articles (mostly on 18th-century France) are published, he has a chauffeur and a housekeeper. He is granted visas too, though his failing health means that he derives little pleasure from the foreign expeditions (I appreciate the pretty moments and doze through the rest,' he sighs as he tours Italy). When his wife Eva dies, he quickly marries again, a woman much younger than himself. They love each other, and he knows himself to be fortunate in her.
Yet nothing can stop his relentless grumpiness. These diaries are miserably joyless, and Klemperer does not emerge from them as particularly likeable. One reviewer, indeed, has justly compared him to Victor Meldrew, the party-pooping depressive of the sitcom One Foot in the Grave; Eeyore and Pooter also come to mind. It is not that he dwells morbidly on the hateful, hideous past or apocalyptic worries for the future. Neither the Nuremberg trials nor the hardening of the Cold War seem to interest him at all. In 1955 he expresses 'constant deep political disappointment' at government policies `so stupid and mendacious' that they 'represent no more than the lesser evil', but there's no fight left in him. In 1949, he attends a youth ceremony and is reminded of the Nazi rallies, but he just can't let it rattle him.
What preoccupies him is a sense of being personally cheated. Thoroughly disillusioned and beset by aches and pains, he turns in on himself, and the last decade of his life is dominated by petty vanities and irritations. He accepts that he is intellectually second-rate, but without good grace —envy of the successful publication of Mimesis by his contemporary Erich Auerbach appears to cause him more anguish than the Berlin airlift or the Hungarian revolution. He puts a premium on his own comfort and convenience, and his own status. He is deeply selfish.
Yet although this volume cannot match its two predecessors for sheer stomachchurning drama, it still makes for deeply engrossing reading. Klemperer was neither a wit, a stylist nor a particularly imaginative man — as a diarist, he does not command the poetic and psychological observancy of Virginia Woolf, nor does he bring an era alive with the vividness and intimacy of Samuel Pepys. Those seeking amusing vignettes should look elsewhere.
But he has the supreme gifts of honesty and scepticism. His moaning is unadorned, one feels, and the authentic expression of what his life was like. He doesn't exaggerate, he doesn't fantasise — and that quality of dogged sobriety in the face of societies run on lies and ideological insanities makes him one of the supreme chroniclers of the 20th century.
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