00:00:55.640Because this is the final installment.
00:00:59.140Of Project 1933, your opus, the project that really, I think, remade this podcast, under your direction, under your, you know, stewardship, how do you feel about bringing it to an end?
00:01:11.900It's feeling pretty real right now. I gotta say, we've spent a lot of time researching this, talking about this, preparing it and recording it. I mean, I think there must be something like, what, 14 to 16 hours of us talking about this one year on whatever app you use to get your podcast.
00:01:28.820that's not nothing it's also been honestly for me a way to kind of deal with 2025 this is my way
00:01:36.420of becoming clearer about what i think is happening and what i think is likely to happen next and then
00:01:43.780the other thing i should mention is that the other reason i'm thinking about it a lot is that it's
00:01:47.340not actually going away because this is the final part of the podcast project 1933 but it's not the
00:01:53.800end of the project, because it's now going to be a book, it turns out.
00:06:25.680You're like, wait, what local opposition?0.67
00:06:27.480They're basically just like doubling and tripling down on their control of Germany.
00:06:32.200And whereas earlier efforts like that often bespeak a degree of insecurity and a lack of certainty about whether or not people were going to go along with this regime, that's no longer the case if you look at their actions.
00:06:47.600And so Mann in his diary, for instance, on the 26th of December, talks about basically like the news coming out of Germany and how peaceful it is.
00:06:54.960And he means that in the worst way possible.
00:06:57.480He calls it the peacefulness in the regimented and over-organized Germany, particularly evident in its sentimental display during the Christmas season, right?
00:07:21.040Or like, it also bespeaks to the defeat and successful suppression of resistance, right?0.70
00:07:26.780The Nazis have really successfully consolidated power by Christmas 1933.0.80
00:07:31.860There's no opposition even for them to abolish.0.91
00:07:35.200Like they're just kind of making official in law what they have already achieved, in fact.
00:07:41.500And then the other thing is, of course, that a lot of the questions is like, well, what are we resisting for right now anyway?
00:07:47.540And Lehmann is very much kind of caught up in that.
00:07:50.560So on December 4th, for instance, he finds out, I think via the radio, that Stefan Gheorga has died, who listeners of this pod will know from one of our super long episodes on my weird preoccupations, the poet Stefan Gheorga, you know, right-wing nationalist, but not in a Nazi way, but in a kind of like way that he never actually liked any German rulers.
00:08:17.000This is, if you haven't listened to our episode on the George Circle, this like crazy right-wing homoerotic poetry group in early 20th century Germany, like look it up.
00:10:53.520We'll talk about how he spends his New Year's.
00:10:56.700But like during the winter of 1933, he has all these visitors.
00:11:00.740What was striking to me is, like, how many of the people who sort of cycle in and out of the Mann household, now that they've settled down in Switzerland, are living in Nazi Germany and are just going to Switzerland to, like, hang out with him for a day.
00:11:11.580It's often, like, other writers or a lot of it is academics.
00:11:16.300And he's like, oh, they're planning to eventually leave, but not yet, right?0.54
00:11:19.760So, like, people, there's starting to be commerce between Nazi Germany and the rest of Europe.
00:11:24.740And basically, people sort of can go back and forth.0.61
00:11:26.900And aside from, like, Jewish-led boycotts, it seems like the international relations are all pretty normal still, right?
00:11:34.000In fact, Mann seems to think that, like, the Nazis are basically getting normalized.
00:11:37.760And that's, in fact, the real sour note.
00:11:40.300I mean, I should say that, I should emphasize that while he's thinking about, like, returning, it's not because he's like, oh, these guys aren't so bad.0.99
00:11:46.020He's like, these guys still fucking suck.0.99
00:13:03.140And the fact that he's found not guilty is then used, in fact, as evidence of the sort of responsibility and justice of the regime rather than the fact that he was, in fact, set up for this, which is like – which was quite flimsy, right?
00:13:19.920So the bar is very low is what Thomas Mann is noting.
00:13:22.580Yeah, or that people want this to be true, right? Because they think that, well, that means that maybe this regime is mellowing out, right? Maybe there still is a state of law in Germany. And he's like, I got news for you. Good luck with that. Like, there ain't, and they're not moderating. And so, yeah, so basically for him, that gives you good sense. Like, he's not looking for signals like, oh, it's getting better over there. He thinks it's terrible.
00:13:47.680But he's sort of trying to assess his own risk and his own strategy vis-a-vis these people.
00:13:52.800It doesn't change his opinion of them any.
00:13:56.320Hey, did you hear that Brett Kavanaugh came out against Kavanaugh stops recently?
00:14:00.320I don't know why that popped into my head, but just, yeah, it's the weirdest things that kind of come to your mind.
00:14:04.940And you do see this in some coverage of the Trump administration or of like sort of Trump-appointed judges whenever they do kind of baseline acknowledgement of the law.
00:14:16.240it is seen as a great coup for the constitution right like look at these checks and balances
00:14:22.560working yeah or as a refutation of like see you hysterical psychos like you said it was fascism
00:14:29.580but that guy didn't get killed so so so who's a fascist now huh yeah yeah yeah and and also like
00:14:36.800a way to like bringing this back to gender um sort of underestimation of the fascist threat
00:14:43.820at least in our own time, is always cast as like masculine and reasonable and sort of maximalist
00:14:50.480interpretation of Trumpist ambitions is understood as feminized and a little bit like hysterical and
00:14:55.180unreasonable. And the actual correlation of prediction with reality or prediction with like
00:15:00.740outcomes is sort of not really germane to those assessments, right? The assessment is like the
00:15:07.720person who seems least scared is most manly and therefore like most credible. And the person who
00:15:14.820seems most scared is most feminine and therefore most non-credible. Whether or not the fear is0.96
00:15:19.920justified is like almost besides the point. And it seems like there's something going on here with
00:15:23.800what Mann is noting in the media treatment of this acquittal, right? It's like, oh, everybody is
00:15:27.980rushing to downplay the fascists because that sort of lets them off the hook. And it also
00:15:34.980is just comforting for reality to not, you know, put so many demands on you, right?
00:15:40.700What if it didn't? What if we could all just sort of exhale?
00:16:28.180Which, like, spoiler alert, it's a race thing, right?
00:16:30.720But there is a lot of this rhetoric, and especially from people who were nominally not members of the Nazi party or who wanted to just be good Nazis or whatever, right?
00:16:39.020There is a whole lot of like, oh, I'm sorry, my hand is being forced here by the fact that you have no students.
00:16:43.800It's like, well, why does this man have no students, right?
00:17:20.760They were like, oh, we can't have everyone run to Switzerland, run to the United States and convert.
00:17:25.500Otherwise, you know, it's just going to destroy our currency.
00:17:29.240And so they had created all these capital controls. I believe the U.S. had this too. The problem was that the Nazis were not using it. It was meant to be about like large sums of like business proceeds, I believe, and huge fortunes. And the Nazis used it largely against Jews.
00:17:47.620Yeah, the Nazis use it to control, like, the household income or just, like, personal assets of individual members of whichever disfavored, like, racial or ideological group that they're persecuting that week. Yeah.
00:17:59.920Yeah, I mean, it's a way of fleecing, especially Jewish Germans, but Social Democrats, too, I guess, to some extent, on their way out, right? It's just highway robbery. They're just like, you know, we will not let you work here. You will have to leave, but you also have to pay us to let you leave.0.87
00:18:16.240So like the Nazis are both, are they encouraging immigration of Jews at this point?0.74
00:18:22.120I mean, I don't think there's like an official decree, but like, I think these signs were pretty obvious for anyone to read, right?
00:18:29.000I mean, the same colleague, I think, has his wife arrested for a day because she's been overheard making anti-Nazi remarks, right?
00:18:36.660Yet another colleague, he says like his nerves are just gone and has applied for retirement at age 50, right?
00:18:43.400Like, people are getting the message loud and clear what this new state wants to do with them, but I don't know if it's official yet.0.62
00:18:50.980You know, it's in some ways comparable to the way that, like, the Trump administration wants officially undocumented immigrants to leave, but they also want to make life hell for anyone who looks like they could, in their Nazi-ass minds, be an undocumented immigrant.0.90
00:19:07.480Yeah, there's a combination of drives towards like very efficient ethnic cleansing, like get these people out of here. And then there's also the kind of like libidinal investments in like racial sadism. And those are not always driven towards the same end, right? Sometimes they're a little bit in conflict. It's like, well, you need the despised minority to be around if you want to torture them, right?0.52
00:19:29.240But at this point, like, Klemperer is looking around at his colleagues at this university in Dresden, and a lot of them are trying to leave, and a lot of them are really sort of suffering under this regime, and he is being pushed out because he's ethnically Jewish.0.52
00:19:43.640Is that basically what's happening up and down the academy?
00:19:47.600Are there people who are, like, very much being encouraged to stay and move up, like, you know, Aryan mediocrities who couldn't get a job beforehand?
00:19:55.340Are they now being shoveled into positions, or is it like a broader defunding?0.96
00:19:59.760No, this is a big bonanza for non-Jewish Germans who wanted to move up in the world.0.58
00:20:05.760It's also, as in so many, although not all parts of German society, a real generational shift.0.97
00:20:12.320It's an easy way for someone who's young and hungry for a job to get that job, right?
00:20:17.860The eternal grad student can now sort of move up and replace the professor that they kind of didn't like to begin with, right?
00:20:24.500I read in Compact magazine that old white men won't retire and have been insufficiently deferential to young white men who want to break into elite industries.0.58
00:20:34.760It seems like something like this Nazi purge of the academy of all the undesirables might really help out that guy who wants a job so badly and thinks he deserves one.
00:20:45.920Is he the guy who went to a conference and went on the job market once almost and then like didn't succeed?0.70
00:20:51.660He interviewed several guys who went on the job market almost and were shocked that they weren't offered tenure track positions in the classics, a thing that definitely exists everywhere now.
00:27:22.500I find them vulgar, whatever, they're out of the scene or they've turned Nazi by now.
00:27:27.580Yeah, the acquiescence of right-wing elites to this, and these are not just inside the government, right?
00:27:33.640There are the coalition partners, but there are, you know, Alfred Hugenberg concludes 1933 is still, I think, like the owner of most newspapers in Germany, right?
00:27:42.980Like, so this guy could presumably do something, right?
00:27:46.700You know, the church, the Catholic church could still do a lot.
00:27:51.000The army, the police, et cetera, et cetera, they've all put up almost no resistance whatsoever. And what resistance they will eventually put up really comes out only once the war is so obviously lost in 1944 that they sort of try to figure out how to like save their own asses.0.93
00:28:09.660So there is just like very little in the way of actual opposition on the right in Germany very, very early on.
00:28:17.620And I think that's an important sort of zoom out lesson as well.
00:28:20.660I think the first one you've already mentioned is the fact that the people who seem to be the savvy kind of analysts of 1933 were the ones that would have given you the wrongness picture of what was happening that year, I think.
00:28:32.320Right down to like, oh, see that one, you know, the Togler case, that all went fine.0.62
00:29:33.680these are the scariest motherfuckers of them all, you know?0.99
00:29:35.800My youth contained this guy who was sort of a boss of me and some of my friends. And he was sort of like emasculated and uncomfortable with his own authority and sort of unused to having the capacity to inflict cruelty, which did nothing to diminish his appetite for it.0.99
00:29:58.960Right. So like watching him put on the costume of an asshole domineering boss was this like really grotesque experience that I had.0.97
00:30:11.780One of my friends was like, God, he wishes he was a misogynist because he's actually too weak to be this like cruel domineering figure.0.99
00:30:19.120And I feel like that's an experience I've witnessed kind of a lot as I see people sort of try to adopt Trumpian vulgarity or like adopt a kind of like avowedness to the racism that isn't like totally natural to them or try to adopt like a style of like kind of swaggering asshole masculinity.0.97
00:30:41.780You know, people seem to be putting on this costume of cruelty to try and have more like claim to authority or to power.
00:30:49.160And that's been like this kind of very strange experience, like watching people do something that is both wrong and unnatural to them in the pursuit of power.
00:31:00.400I mean, I think J.D. Vance is a pretty good example for this.
00:31:02.620And it seems to bear out Heinrich Mann's insight entirely in the sense that they don't know their own limits.
00:31:07.560Like, some people know the kind of limits of their own cruelty, and these people don't because, like, it's not their own cruelty, right? It's someone else's cruelty. There's this guy, Hans Frank, who will end up being the governor of Poland, basically, under Hitler and will be, you know, absolute butcher there and will be hanged, I believe, at the Nuremberg trials or after the Nuremberg trials.
00:31:31.540And that guy, he's like a concert pianist, all this stuff.
00:31:36.320Like, this is the kind of guy that Heinrich Mann is thinking of.
00:31:39.300And you can really tell, like, the German historian and journalist Joachim Fest calls him, I think, like, imitation or like a simulacrum of Hitler.
00:31:48.940He's like, he just watched this guy and then taught himself how to be like that, right?
00:31:53.900And he's like, and you can tell that this is not, he doesn't have any genuine core to this, which isn't like, neither of these is better.
00:31:59.980But somehow the cruelty is even more unhinged if it's just like not actually attached to anything.
00:32:05.840It's just like purely imitative, you know.
00:32:11.660So like in some way, the scariest thing are these right-wing elites who are not coming to it genuinely,0.59
00:32:16.340but like are now falling all over themselves to try and imitate these already absolutely horrible psychopaths and sociopaths in power.
00:32:25.680The third thing I would like to sort of underline
00:32:28.740that we've been coming back to, I think, again and again and again
00:32:31.020is the idea of 1933 as really a stress test of German democracy,
00:32:34.500but also an index of how much democracy had already eroded, right?
00:32:40.160Some of this had to do with institutional structures, right?
00:32:43.540Like the fact that, you know, the president was sort of appointing
00:32:46.240cabinets left and right, that Prussia was no longer fully independent, right?
00:32:50.300That there was all this kind of constitutional breakdown already happening.
00:32:54.760But some of it also had to do a lot with feelings and the outlook of people who had control of those institutions, right?0.51
00:33:01.840So, for instance, we talked about this Nazi fixation on victimhood and martyrdom.
00:33:07.160And we've sort of been saying, like, gee, it's crazy that people could be in power in all these ways and yet picture themselves as these poor downtrodden victims all the time.
00:33:17.340And something I think we maybe didn't mention as much is that, of course, martyrdom and victimhood were something that that entire society had basically its brain pickled in since 1918, right? This was something that Germans, I mean, maybe not the communists, but any German to the right of the communists had some reaction to it, some kind of investment in this narrative. And the Nazis were just kind of feeding that, right?
00:33:42.580You know, the importance of victimhood, the importance of the collective, the importance of violence and suffering as a thing that created this collective, right, seems really important to the kind of potentials that Nazis are able to activate in 1933.0.55
00:33:58.820To mention briefly again, this guy, Frank, Hans Frank, that guy was too young to be a veteran, but he lost a brother in World War I, right?
00:34:07.300And then he had joined the Freikorps during the communist uprisings in Munich in 1919.
00:34:13.860Meaning, right, it's this thing that we talked a lot about with the SA, that like, it's not like you yourself have necessarily suffered, but suffering has been visited upon you or it's near you or it's never far from you.
00:34:24.420Or you have been, you know, the ordinariness of your life or it's sort of like received conditions are in some way unjust.
00:34:32.300I'm thinking of, like, the right-wing meme, like, this is what they took from you with, like, an AI-generated picture of, like, a busty blonde in a kitchen, you know?0.87
00:34:43.640Yeah, there's, like, a sense of, okay, your entitlement to a more gratifying kind of life has been subverted by this nefarious they, these others, right?0.97
00:34:56.720And there is a project of community making through that sense of deprivation that is central to the American authoritarian project, for sure.
00:35:05.860And you definitely see a lot of sort of rhyming similarities between, you know, in America, it's just kind of like economic decline and like imperial decline.
00:35:14.740And in Germany, it was just like much more immediate and violent memory of total war.
00:35:20.860Yeah, but the important thing is that it's not something that the Nazis uniquely serviced. In some ways, they just picked up on something or gave an extreme version of something that really was accepted widely across society. And that is the real problem, that that structure of affect, even if the Nazis' specific policies were not broadly recognized or broadly shared by other parties, these feelings of aggrievement, of, as you say, of them having taken something away from you, of having been stabbed in the back, etc., etc.,
00:35:50.180were quite pervasive, or the fact that the Allies were mistreating Germany, etc., etc., right?
00:35:55.880And another example of this, by the way, is that one of the things that we talked about quite a lot
00:36:00.540this year is that the Nazis partly overwhelmed the Weimar Republic through their paramilitaries.0.58
00:36:06.460But the Weimar Republic, especially under Kur von Schleicher, had largely nursed those very
00:36:12.420same paramilitaries, hoping to use them to bolster the Reichware, right? So this is the other0.92
00:36:17.460interesting thing, like these structures and these institutions outside of the main government
00:36:24.460that undo this republic are not inventions of the Nazis. They really are inventions of the final
00:36:31.280conservative-leaning governments of the Weimar Republic, really, right? And so that's the other
00:36:36.940important similarity, I think, to the U.S. It's not that these are exogenous forces. The calls
00:36:42.760coming from inside the house for quite some time. And the structures of affect that the authoritarian
00:36:48.420is able to play on has been part of the overall zeitgeist well beyond sort of far-right voter
00:36:56.380potentials for quite some time, right? You know, I mean, the example I always give, although this
00:37:00.800by now kind of aged, is the number of Americans who are not sort of Rambo-loving anti-communists
00:37:08.080who still can sort of sound like the Vietnam War
00:37:10.920was something that happened to American GIs.
00:37:13.320And it's like, I'd love to interest you in the, you know,
00:37:16.420several million people who that war also happened to0.99
00:37:18.960who you don't seem to give a shit about.0.98
00:37:21.340And the ability to visit violence on another country0.99
00:37:24.900and then spend years making beautiful films about,
00:37:28.480admittedly beautiful films about how much you were a victim of it.
00:37:38.080Yeah, genocide will really fuck with your love life.0.97
00:37:42.520But yeah, there's just like a toxic stew that the Nazis are able to activate, but it's a toxic stew that they didn't create.0.96
00:37:48.300It's a toxic stew that was widely shared, including among people that were very much opposed to the Nazis, but they were able to play on this kind of general toxic atmosphere.0.54
00:37:59.140The other thing I wanted to highlight for our listeners as a kind of through line is this question of grief and avoidance.
00:38:06.160I think one way to think about 2025, I think for a lot of us who are not Nazis, is that it's been a year of grief, right? There's a lot of, you have to say goodbye to things that you thought you knew about the world. You have to say goodbye, bid farewell to people who you thought were your allies and who would have your back and who would obviously stand up for what's right, even if you didn't politically agree with them.
00:38:28.940And with some exceptions, you know, I will honorably mention Brett Stevens, who I think wrote a column calling for a general strike.
00:38:38.260I'm like, OK, Brett, like, so this is more of this.
00:38:46.560A lot of institutions who didn't need to have cooperated with Donald Trump. A lot of people who have professional or like personal cushion to absorb a blow of defying the administration have chosen not to.
00:39:04.640A lot of people who have professed principles that you think would lead them to opposition, you know, quite vocally to things that are happening in this country have been, you know, either silent or actively complicit.
00:39:17.760And that's been like really heartbreaking.
00:39:28.040Their public representatives either gone or having basically swerved far to the right.
00:39:34.640There's a wonderful book by Sebastian Hafner, who was this journalist, this German journalist and historian, who was not Jewish and in 1933 was basically studying to become a lawyer.
00:39:46.020And so he was like, I'm sticking around, though he kind of knew he was going to immigrate.
00:39:49.620But he stuck around because he was like, well, I at least need to get my degree in case this ever blows over.
00:39:55.380And he wrote this book, translated as Defying Hitler.
00:39:58.620He wrote it in 1939 once he was in England, but he never published it.
00:42:08.140So they're like shaving or like playing chess and whatever.
00:42:11.300And so he's like talking about the guy he's playing chess with.
00:42:13.560And he's like, I feel like he's flinching at the right things.
00:42:18.400Maybe I should make a joke and see how it lands.
00:42:21.640But like, right, they're just kind of trying to like suss each other out.
00:42:24.780And then something that made me realize is that so much of Nazi propaganda was about the fact that you had to experience it collectively at your workplace, in school, et cetera, et cetera.
00:42:35.080And you were always encouraged to monitor each other's reactions.0.65
00:42:38.640And so on the one hand, you kind of think like, well, gee, luckily, we're a little bit more individualistic now.
00:42:43.320And we kind of don't tend to experience things in public or as a collective all the time.
00:42:47.780But then I had to think about, you know, the obsessive need of some of our media to check out every professor's social media if like some right wing podcaster gets killed, right? Like, oh, what did they say on Blue Sky, right? Like, this is our version of that, right?
00:43:04.260Like to keep feeding us things that they want a public reaction to and then kind of calling out or brutally attacking people who don't quite measure up to what their ideal reaction to whatever news they were just sharing with us.
00:43:20.540I think social media very much has replicated in the Trump administration a lot of the kind of functioning of public broadcasting in the early Nazi years, where like you watch other people assimilate to this new world and your reaction to it will become itself a subject of scrutiny and a possible site of punitive action by the state, right?
00:43:46.660Note that Klemperer's colleague's wife does go to jail for like 24 hours.
00:44:18.060I feel like every two weeks, some little dipshit at, like, University of the Risen Christ, you know, has their phone out, pointed at a, like, transgender PhD student just trying to get through this adjuncting gig.0.96
00:44:38.220And when they inevitably get the video that they're looking for, then there are people in elected office who make sure that that video of somebody failing to toe the right wing party line, who is like usually vulnerable in some other way, is made into a like example in national right wing media and then loses their job.
00:45:03.680Right. And it's this quasi ritualized hate experiment. It's like exactly the mirror image of what they accused the left of doing in the cancel culture panic. Right. Exactly.
00:45:13.400They weren't afraid of that. They were aspiring to that, that nightmare of these like young people who can surveil you and report you and ruin your life for not agreeing with them is something they were very, very, you know, nominally very, very afraid of and now have created and weaponized for their own ends.
00:46:30.000And there's reason here for hope, I think.
00:46:31.940I think one thing that really strikes me as a big difference as we look back on 1933 and compare it to 2025 is that, you know, maybe just because America has this more individualistic culture and this, you know, technologically enabled public discourse that can be very fractious.0.51
00:46:48.240And maybe just because it's like a bigger country, the MAGA movement has way less support proportionally in the U.S. in 2025 than the Nazis did in Germany in 1933.
00:47:00.820There's just way more people who hate this shit as a proportion of the population in America now than there was in Germany then.0.99
00:47:08.620And they were able to consolidate power so quickly, not just because they were so brutal to the opposition, but because their opposition was quite small.0.99
00:47:17.880You know, the reason why the right wing is able to, as you say, weaponize these kinds of images is because there are institutions willing to sign on to it.
00:47:26.920These instructors are getting fired by universities.
00:47:29.940their stories are being picked up by the Atlantic and being like,
00:47:32.680well, maybe they should have been fired or whatever, right?
00:47:35.800Like from these free speech warriors over at the Atlantic or whatever.
00:47:38.640Everybody who signed the Harper's letter now thinks that MAGA is actually doing exactly what they wanted it to do.
00:48:31.080Like, yeah, he threw that sandwich, but the ice fucker deserved it.1.00
00:48:34.900But so, yeah, maybe I should briefly give people a kind of outro to this whole project1.00
00:48:40.280and tell you a little bit about, especially Klemperer's story,
00:48:43.820and we'll talk about Mann's story a little bit as well,
00:48:46.660just kind of what happened to him afterwards.
00:48:48.480So he and Eva slowly did finish the house and move in
00:48:52.000as the world darkened more and more around them.
00:48:55.000His brother Georg moves to the U.S. in 1935, but Klemperer does stay around.
00:49:01.100He continues lecturing to dwindling handfuls of students until basically he gets fully laid off from the university in 1935, allegedly for lack of student need.0.97
00:49:12.700And then by 1940, the Klemperers have to leave their beloved house and move into government housing for Jews.1.00
00:50:44.260In March 1942, a former friend and such an anti-Nazi, he remarks sardonically, named Berger, buys the house from Klemperer's Aryan trustee.
00:50:54.220He had to have an Aryan hold, quote-unquote Aryan, hold the house in trust, and the guy sold it under him, so they just stole it from him.
00:51:02.320And in that same month, March 1942, there's an interesting note in Klemperer's diary, which I think is both ominous, but also really interesting in terms of like what people knew when about what was happening.0.92
00:51:14.880He talks about making deliveries to a prison where basically people are being kept before deportation.
00:51:20.500At midday on Friday, relatives bring underwear for the prisoners in the police cells.
00:51:24.800As long as the underwear is accepted and exchanged for used underwear, then the man is at least still there.
00:52:22.120And on January 15, 1945, I thought it was very interesting,
00:52:25.680Klemperer notes in his diaries a set of news he has received from a, quote, fellow star wearer, an old infirm man named Schwartz, who was freed from labor service and therefore had time to hang out with him.
00:52:38.100This guy, Schwartz, seems to have access to a radio, and a lot of people are listening to both German radio and, by this point, Allied radio in, you know, 1945.
00:52:46.540and Schwarz tells him exactly what he was hearing.
00:52:51.480From British radio, basically, he knows that the German counteroffensives
00:52:55.160in the East and in the West have collapsed.
00:52:58.400But then he adds that he's heard another really uplifting broadcast,
00:53:02.380and it's Thomas Mann, recorded all the way in his house
00:53:05.520on San Remo Drive in Pacific Palisades
00:53:07.920as part of his German language addresses to Deutsche Hörer,
00:54:13.020And on February 13th, 1945, there's an order.1.00
00:54:17.420All Jews in Dresden have to report for deportation, including Jews in mixed marriages, which is the case for the Klemperers.0.92
00:54:23.960Klemperer at this point has a job where basically he has to deliver the news to various families, I think in these Jews' homes is what they were called, including parents and children.0.99
00:54:35.020children. There's this horrifying anecdote he relates where the child asks him to like keep
00:54:41.540her teddy bear, you know, if they have to go. It's really awful. And the trains are to leave on
00:54:47.240February 16th. Klemper is not on the list yet, but he knows that he's going to be swept up the week
00:54:53.000after that. And as you know from that entry, he's fully aware of what this deportation is going to
00:54:58.860mean. But this is where fate intervenes, because they're all supposed to leave on February 16th.
00:55:05.480At 951, on February 13th, the day he has to deliver these notices, the air raid sirens go
00:55:12.500off throughout Dresden. It's the Brits and it's the Americans. And Frau Stühle, his neighbor in0.67
00:55:17.680the Jews' house, remarks, I hope they smash it all as they head into the air raid shelter.1.00
00:55:23.520As indeed they do. I think our listeners might be a little familiar about what the allies do1.00
00:55:27.880to Dresden. It's not pretty. That is this day. Wow. And he, because I think their air raid
00:55:34.040shelter was further away from their building, he gets to see a lot of it. And because the
00:55:39.180so-called Jew's house was located in the old town, very center of town, he has basically0.51
00:55:45.760front row seats to, yes, the destruction of Dresden, the famous Dresden firestorm. He writes,
00:55:52.160suddenly the window on the back wall opposite the entrance burst open and outside it was bright as
00:55:57.580day. Someone shouted, incendiary bomb, we have to put it out. Klemperer gets struck in the face by
00:56:03.100debris and a group of Russian POWs, who has no idea where they even came from, help him outside.
00:56:09.880Basically, they have to leave the bomb shelter, but he's lost Eva. So he finds a fellow inmate with
00:56:15.540his little son on his shoulder who's looking for his wife and other children, and they shelter in
00:56:19.740various large buildings and eventually find open space. The old city of Dresden sits on a bit of a
00:56:25.420bluff above the river Elba. And I think what they do is, as best as I could reconstruct it,
00:56:29.660they head to the river away from the flames and from the explosions, where he finds Eva,
00:56:35.100who's been pulled into the Aryan shelter, the quote-unquote Aryan shelter, when the explosion
00:56:40.640started. And the raid will go on for two days. It's the 13th through the 15th of February.
00:56:47.020It's the famous one that Kurt Vonnegut immortalized in Slaughterhouse-Five. It's
00:56:51.660famous for both the phosphorus bombs, the incendiary bombs,0.92
00:56:54.480and the sustained double-tap attacks.0.55
00:56:56.240So, like, they'd wait for a few hours for people to try and put out the flames
00:58:50.780And so they first move east, hoping to find the Red Army.0.55
00:58:54.900But the Wehrmacht is in between them and the Red Army,0.55
00:58:57.480busy making its last suicidal stand.0.53
00:58:59.400And so they turn around and head south instead to Bavaria.
00:59:03.060And on April 29th, 1945, they're in a small village just about 20 miles from Augsburg
00:59:09.160when they meet the first American tanks.
00:59:11.600And that is where, yeah, where Victor Kremper's time in the Third Reich ends.
00:59:17.940So this guy wasn't a priority for deportation or extermination, right?
00:59:23.620So he kind of bided his time under the suppression of the Nuremberg Laws and of Nazi suppression of Jewish life.
00:59:31.880And then it was luck of timing and the collapse of the Nazi regime under basically military defeat that is what saves his life.
00:59:42.680So he gets to die of something else because he survived the war.0.75
00:59:46.120Yeah, and you're exactly right. It's pure luck. The fact that the diary survives is pure luck.
00:59:50.860The reason we have this story, the reason we know him, the reason he is able to go on to a post-war career is simply because he got lucky where others didn't.
01:00:10.120Historians can correct me on this, but I think that the number of German Jews who were rounded up and just shot, for instance, in a ditch, is pretty small.
01:00:18.020It was always done with deportation trains, et cetera, et cetera.
01:00:22.640That takes time and that takes organization, an organization that can break down as your regime sort of starts losing a war.0.58
01:00:29.520Whereas in the East, of course, you know, we always think of the Holocaust as being entirely about death camps. It wasn't, right? Like a lot of the Holocaust happened on the sides of highways and it didn't involve maniacal SS commanders played by Ralph Fiennes in, you know, Spielberg movies. It also involved just like average Germans following orders to gun down women, children and the elderly, right?
01:00:56.200No, it's 21-year-olds shooting a bunch of Polish villagers.0.74
01:01:10.960But it didn't all look like the highly coordinated, like, industrial-scale slaughter that we think of as, like, the Capital H Holocaust.0.89
01:01:19.000I mean, the numbers are still staggering, but you're right.
01:01:21.760The means were more conventional, exactly.
01:01:24.240But yeah, he, I mean, one hesitates to use the word lucky, but he is lucky in this way.
01:02:45.220You were much more likely to run into a former camp commander at a West German party conference than you were, you know, in East Germany.
01:02:55.220Now, Stalinism isn't exactly wonderful either, but, like, it's important to note that, like, at least in terms of forgiveness, you know, I don't quite remember what his reasons were against emigrating to the West, but that may have been part of it, that he thought, like, well, at least they're making a genuine break with what happened to me and they're really trying to do better.
01:03:15.220It's interesting to me that he joins the Communist Party because I knew Viktor Klemper as kind of politically conservative at the outset of the war.
01:03:21.740Is that a genuine conversion or is this just kind of what you do if you're like an ambitious, smart guy in East Germany?
01:03:27.320Is he just going along to get along or is he now a communist?
01:03:30.640Well, I mean, maybe, but also, you know, it is another totalitarian system and you have to be a member of the party.
01:03:36.060So you got to join a party and he joins. It's the only one he can join, really.
01:03:41.160Well, he also was a member of parliament for a little while. So there you absolutely had to be a member of the Socialist Unity Party, the SED. And he died in 1960 at age 77. Eva died 10 years earlier, which is significant because he remarried a much younger woman, a Germanist, who, starting in the mid-80s, began publishing selections from Victor's diaries.
01:04:06.820So still in East Germany, she started publishing these diaries, or at least excerpts from them.
01:04:12.100And so in 1995, 35 years after his death, 40 years after the bombing of Dresden,
01:04:19.920Viktor Klemperer's diaries became a bestseller in Germany.
01:04:23.200I still remember this as a teenager, like these stacks of these massive diaries in the bookstores.
01:04:42.480So, I mean, I don't think there's a happy end to 1933 in any way, shape or form, but I thought that maybe this will give people at least a little glimmer of hope that there is something afterwards and there are these stories of survival and of endurance that are really, yeah, that should give us hope and that people were probably already envisioning as a possible future on that very frigid December 31st, 1933.
01:05:10.140I think that's a great place to leave it
01:05:13.340Adrienne, thank you so much for taking me along this journey