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Cargando... The Lesser Evil: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer, 1945-59 (1999)por Victor Klemperer
   Ninguno Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro.   ) charlie68 | Sep 29, 2013 |  After the armistice Victor Klemperer and his wife Eva experienced a remarkable, 180-degree turn of fortune. They got their house back; he was feted by everybody (they were all anxious to demonstrate that THEY had not been Jew-hating Nazis, thank you very much); his academic career rose from the grave and he became a minor celebrity within the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). Wealth, fame and international travel (even as far away as China) followed. Yet from my reading of the diary I can't say Klemperer's postwar years were happy ones. He considered Communism the "lesser evil" to capitalism, but he was uneasy about the similarities he noticed between the Communist government and the Nazis. He witnessed the revival of anti-Semitism and the rise of Holocaust denial. He got embroiled in petty academic infighting while becoming convinced that his star was only on the ascendancy for lack of competitors within the GDR. Eva Klemperer died in 1951 and Victor remarried within a year to Hadwig, a former student who was twenty-five years to his seventy. They deeply loved one another, but he felt guilty for his seeming "betrayal" of Eva and for denying Hadwig her youth and the possibility of children. And, in the final years, his health went into a marked decline, forcing Hadwig to be a nursemaid to him more often than not. Were it not for the deep impression Klemperer's earlier diaries made on me, and my determination to see his life through, I probably would not have read this book. But it is a good demonstration of life in the early years of the GDR (before the Berlin Wall was erected) and of much historical interest. Unlike the first two diaries I think this one can stand on its own. ( )1  meggyweg | Jun 17, 2010 | sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
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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) No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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 Google Books — Cargando...GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)943.087092History and Geography Europe Germany and central Europe Historical periods of Germany Germany 1866- East And West 1945-1990 History, geographic treatment, biography BiographyClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio: (3.88)
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