Victor Klemperer

German Romance languages professor who became known as a diarist across three decades of Jewish experience in Germany. His journals, published posthumously in Germany in 1995, detail his life under the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, and the German Democratic Republic. Those covering the period of the Third Reich have since become standard sources and have been extensively quoted by Saul Friedländer, Michael Burleigh, Richard J. Evans, and Max Hastings.

His parents were Dr. Wilhelm Klemperer, a rabbi, and Henriette née Frankel. Victor Klemperer had three brothers and four sisters. He was a cousin of the conductor Otto Klemperer.

Victor Klemperer was a student of philosophy, Romance and German studies at universities in Munich, Geneva, Paris and Berlin from 1902 to 1905, and later worked as a journalist and writer in Berlin, until he resumed his studies in Munich from 1912. He completed his doctorate (on Montesquieu) in 1913 and was habilitated under the supervision of Karl Vossler in 1914. From 1914 to 1915, Klemperer lectured at the University of Naples, after which he became a decorated military volunteer in World War I. From 1920 he was Professor of Romance Languages at the Technical University of Dresden.

Since his wife, Eva, was "Aryan", Klemperer avoided deportation, often narrowly, but in 1940, he and his wife were rehoused under miserable conditions in a "Jews' House" (Judenhaus) with other "mixed couples". Here, and especially when he ventured out, or at factories where he was forced to work, he was routinely questioned, mistreated, and humiliated by the Gestapo, Hitler Youth members and Dresden citizens. Only because of his wife the couple were able to procure food enough to subsist.

On 13 February 1945, the day preceding the night bombing of Dresden, Klemperer assisted in delivering notices of deportation to some of the last remaining members of the Jewish community in Dresden.