Ken wrote:
> Can someone check the text Huber cites below, and see if he
> cites it accurately? …
The last clause appears indeed to be a Huberesque invention. I
haven’t checked the rest of the text all that carefully so here
is the original as posted on
http://www.germany-info.org
AUFBAU PUBLISHERS SELL U.S. TRANSLATION RIGHTS TO KLEMPERER JOURNALS FOR
RECORD SUM
One of Germany’s most talked about recent
bestsellers will soon be coming to bookstores in
the United States. In 1935, Victor Klemperer
(1881-1960) was forced from his position as a
professor of Romance languages in Dresden because
he was a Jew. He was shortly thereafter deprived of
all access to the university library, making it
impossible for him to carry on his scholarly work,
so he devoted himself all the more intently to the
journal he had maintained since 1897. Klemperer
avoided deportation and the prospect of death in a
concentration camp, but, even though he was married
to a gentile, he could not escape the civic
disenfranchisement of the Jews under Nazi rule. The
step-by-step exclusion of the Jews from German
society and the indignities heaped upon them figure
prominently in Klemperer’s journal entries from the
years 1933-1945, which were published last fall by
the Berlin-based Aufbau Verlag under the title Ich
will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten (I Want to
Give Witness to the End). Aufbau announced
Saturday (May 4) that it had sold the rights for a
U.S. edition to Random House for approximately DM
840,000 (U.S. $542,000), a record sum for the
translation rights to a work originally published
in German.
Despite their formidable bulk (1,700 pages) the two
volumes of Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten
made it onto Germany’s bestseller list last fall.
The work stirred much discussion, in part because
of Klemperer’s eloquently precise detailing of the
Third Reich’s fundamental barbarism, in part
because of his emphatic defense of Germany in the
face of that barbarism. Klemperer, a veteran of the
First World War and true-believing product of
Germany’s educational tradition in the humanities,
insisted in his journal that the Nazis were an
aberration, that they were the exact opposite of
all that his Germany represented.
