I Will Bear Witness 1942-45 A Diary of the Nazi Years Quotes

“March 18...[1945]
Brief morning reflection arisen from great love. In fact, the main point after all is that for forty years we have so much loved one another and do love one another; in fact, I am not at all sure at all that all this is going to come to an end. For certain, nothingness--en tant que individual consciousness, and there is the true nothingness--is altogether probable, and anything else highly improbable. But have we not continually experienced, since 1914 and even more since 1933 and with ever greater frequency in recent weeks, the most utterly improbable, the most monstrously fantastic things? Has not what was formerly completely unimaginable to us become commonplace and a matter of course? If I have lived through the persecutions in Dresden, if I have lived through February 13 and these weeks as a refugee--why should I not just as well live (or rather: die) to find the two of us somewhere, Eva and I, with angel wings or in some other droll form? It's not only the word "impossible" that has gone out of circulation, "unimaginable" also has no validity anymore.”
― Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness 1942-45 A Diary of the Nazi Years

“Today over breakfast we talked about the extraordinary capacity of human beings to bear and become accustomed to things. The fantastic hideousness of our existence: fear of every ring at the door, of ill-treatment, insults, fear for one’s life, of hunger (real hunger), ever new bans, ever more cruel enslavement, deadly danger coming closer every day, every day new victims all around us, absolute helplessness — and yet still hours of pleasure, while reading aloud, while working, while eating our less than meagre food, and so we go on eking out a bare existence and go on hoping.
[Dresden, 30 May 1942]”
― Victor Klemperer , I Will Bear Witness 1942-45 A Diary of the Nazi Years

“National Socialism adapts Fascism, Bolshevism, Americanism, works it all into Teutonic Romanticism.”
― Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness 1942-45 A Diary of the Nazi Years

“A generation has more in common, after all, than a nation, than a profession.”
― Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness 1942-45 A Diary of the Nazi Years

“Nicht einmal Sprachlehrer kann ich sein, nur Geistesgeschichte vortragen und nur in deutscher Sprache, in völlig deutschem Sinn. Ich muss hier leben und hier sterben.”
― Victor Klemperer, Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten Das Jahr 1942