Never - never in my whole life - has my head spun as much from a book as it did with Rosenberg’s Myth. Not because his writings were exceptionally pr… - Victor Klemperer

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Never - never in my whole life - has my head spun as much from a book as it did with Rosenberg’s Myth. Not because his writings were exceptionally profound, difficult to comprehend or emotionally overwhelming, but because Clemens hammered on my head with the book for minutes on end. (Clemens and Weser were the principal torturers of the Jews in Dresden, and they were generally differentiated as the Hitter and the Spitter.) ‘How dare a Jewish pig like you presume to read a book of this kind?’ Clemens yelled. To him it seemed like the desecration of a consecrated wafer. ‘How dare you have a book here from the lending library?’ Only the fact that the volume had demonstrably been borrowed in the name of my Aryan wife, and, moreover, that the sheet of notes which accompanied it was torn up without being deciphered, saved me at the time from the concentration camp.

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About Victor Klemperer

Victor Klemperer (9 October 1881 – 11 February 1960) worked as a commercial apprentice, a journalist and eventually a Professor of Literature, specialising in the French Enlightenment at the Technische Universität Dresden. He kept notes throughout the years of the Third Reich on how the German language was twisted to serve the purposes of the Nazi regime these were published as LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen ("The Language of the Third Reich: A Philologist's Notebook") in 1947. His diaries detailing his life under successive German states—the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic—were published in 1995.

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Additional quotes by Victor Klemperer

Only a year after the collapse of the Third Reich a strangely conclusive piece of evidence can be advanced to support the claim that "fanatical", this key National Socialist term, never really had the sting taken out of it by excessive use. For although scraps of the LTI surface all over the place in contemporary language, "fanatical" has disappeared. From this one can safely conclude that either consciously or subconsciously people remained aware of the real facts of the case all through those twelve years, namely, that a confused state of mind, equally close to sickness and criminality, was for twelve years [of Nazi rule] held to be the greatest virtue.

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