Born in 1881, Victor Klemperer studied in Munich, Geneva and Paris. He was a journalist in Berlin, taught at the University of Naples and received a DSM during WWI as a volunteer in the German army. He was subsequently a professor of romance languages at the Dresden Technical College until he was dismissed as a consequence of Nazi laws in 1935. He survived the Holocaust and the war and taught again as an academic until his death in 1960.
The best written, most evocative, most observant record of daily life in the Third Reich * NEW YORK TIMES * It is a fascinating record which deserves to stand beside the diary of Anne Frank as a day-to-day description of the sufferings of the victims of Hitler's evil regime * EVENING STANDARD * Few English readers will fail to be moved as I was - ultimately to the point of tears * SUNDAY TELEGRAPH * Klemperer was a shrewd judge of human nature and unsparing of his own. As a diarist he is in the Pepys class ... He is, quite simply, the German of record * SPECTATOR * These are the day-to-day records ... of an unheroic man who showed, in keeping them, inconceivable courage -- Penelope Fitzgerald * TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT * These diaries constitute one of the most vital historical and human documents of their age. Packed with vivid observation, profound reflection ... they find hope, dignity and even tart humour in the jaws of hell * INDEPENDENT * Of all the books I have read on the subject, I find it hard to think of one which has taught me more * SUNDAY TELEGRAPH * A heroic diarist who has left an invaluable record of the Third Reich * INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY * This is a truly monumental work, destined to become a source book for anyone studying the Third Reich -- Eva Figes * HAMPSTEAD AND HIGHGATE EXPRESS * The diary's value, apart from the quality of its writing ... lies in its detailed narrative of the humiliations suffered by Jews ... That is the guiding spirit of this remarkable book * TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT * He has left an extraordinary historical document which in its own way is an invaluable contribution to an understanding not just of Jewish life under the Nazi regime, but of the whole German wartime experience * SUNDAY TRIBUNE *