The recent publication of Goldhagens book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners..
.” is contradicted by the recently purchased (rights) to the _Klemperer
Journals_, painstakingly written over the Hitler years by a j*wish
eyewitness:
>From this week’s (May 10) issue of _The Week in
Germany_ (TWIG), which can be found on the Internet at
,
and :
_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, something from an
eyewitness which contradicts the new book by Goldhagen who blames all
Germans, even little babies.
From: [email protected] (M Huber)
Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Survivors’s story decries GOLDHAGEN’s
Date: 20 May 1996 12:06:18 GMT
