Victor Klemperer (Landsberg (Prussia) 1881-1960), decorated veteran of World War I, businessman, journalist and eventually a Professor of Literature, specializing in the French Enlightenment at the Dresden University of Technology, specialised in the literature of the XVIIIth Century. He was the son of a rabbi, and cousin to the famous conductor Otto Klemperer and brother to the surgeon Georg Klemperer, who was a physician of Lenin.

Klemperer was Jewish and his life started to worsen considerably after the rise of the Nazis to power in 1933. Klemperer had held a diary since before 1933, but from there, his notes took the "SOS message to self" connotation which would turn into LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii.

From 1935, under the Nuremberg Laws of Citizenship and Race, he was deprived of his academic title, and forced to work in a factory. Since his wife was "Aryan", Klemperer dodged deportation for most of the war, but was forced to live a miserable life in a ghetto (Judenhaus), where he was routinely questioned, mistreated and humiliated by Nazi personnel.

Due to be deported on the 13th of February, 1945, he used the confusion created by Allied bombings that night to remove his yellow star, join a refugee column, and escape into American-controlled territory. His house and belongs were destroyed but he and his wife survived.

Klemperer's diary was published in 1995 as Tagebücher (Berlin, Aufbau) and translated into English under the name I Will Bear Witness.

External links

• The everyday life of tyranny
• Ms Susie Ehrmann. The Diaries of Victor Klemperer
• "Surviving the Firestorm" (Excert from his diary describing the bombing of Dresden)