Prussianism, Nazism, and Romanticism in the Thought of Victor Klemperer

Abstract

The recent publication of Victor Klemperer's Tagebucher, 1933-1945, as well as his other diaries and memoirs, has forced us to re-evaluate work of this half-forgotten scholar.1 Klemperer, a professional philologist of Jewish origins, was able to survive era without leaving Germany largely because his wife was an Aryan. Deeply patriotic, he was increasingly tortured by question of just how closely German culture he had always championed might be related to Nazism he despised. While Klemperer originally believed that National Socialism was nothing more than a mixture of undeutsch foreign doctrines crabbed together by a fraudulent government, he eventually decided that it was a German phenomenon after all. In analysis of Language entitled LTI (Lingua Tertii Imperii) which he developed in his diaries and published in 1947, Klemperer thus attempted to formulate a coherent explanation of relationship between German culture and National Socialism by linking them both to Romanticism.2 But while characterization of Germanic culture as Romantic foreshadowed theories of a plethora of post-war historians, it was also flawed. Ironically, Klemperer's own writings contain elements of a more radical if controversial characterization of National Socialism. I. Nazism as Romanticism? Michael Nerlich has called Victor Klemperer of last if last representatives of French in a National Socialist Germany increasingly under spell of Romanticism.3 It was from perspective of Enlightenment that Klemperer asked central question which has continued to haunt modern historians from Meinecke to Goldhagen; namely, how could Germans of Goethe's time have mutated into those of Hitler's Reich.4 To answer this question, Klemperer believed, it was necessary to trace history of German antisemitism. As early as 1933 he had already noted that the fate of Hitler movement lies without question in Jewish affairs (liegt fraglos in der Judensache).5 In LTI, Klemperer went on to argue that constituted central and in every respect decisive factor in Nazism. Not only was Jew-hatred Nazi Party's most effective means of propaganda, its most effective and popular means of concretizing race doctrine, but it was actually for German masses identical with race itself.6 While conceding that antisemitism had been too common a feature in history to blame it on Germans alone, Klemperer also argued that German antisemitism of period was unique in three ways. In first place, its sheer virulence was atavistic, harking back to Medieval times. In second place, it arrived not in garb of past, but in that of most extreme modernity (sondern in hochster Modernitat). Finally, it was racial rather than religious, and thus irrevocable. 7 What appeared to be a return to Spanish doctrine of Limpieza de Sangre was now clothed in language of zoology. This emphasis on racial antisemitism only set Nazism apart from earlier forms of Jew hatred, but from other forms of fascism. Klemperer thus noted that although Italian fascism sought to restore Roman state, it never taught that the inhabitants of reconquered domains would stand lower in zoological scale than descendants of Romulus.8 But if antisemitism was unique, in what way was it particularly German? Klemperer attempted to answer this question by more or less distinguishing between general traits on one hand and specific doctrines on other. In course of his experiences under Nazism, he came to believe that general traits of Germans included a proto-Romantic tendency toward a megalomaniac universalism, a Grenzenlosigkeit which manifested itself in taking things beyond their conventional limits, a Grundeigenschaft der Masslosigkeit.9 In this context, Hitlerism exhibited a characteristically Romantic rejection of conventional boundaries, with its messianic pretensions and its fanatic agenda of die ganze Welt oder Nichts. …