The Lesser Evil: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1945-59 (ISBN 0753817942)

Pity it is so much missing:
I was excited to read the rest of his life and journal : I do like a lot how he writes. I do not like at all, all the editorial cuts and even less when they felt they have to remplace it with a cold short story "what was cut" altering a lot the flow of reading. Or it was not important, and they could have put (...) like elsewere, or they should have left it there. His journals are so important, I am so sorry that I cannot read German, where they are twice as long. Already, the second wife cut some from his words, now the editors and the translators. Really pity !

When Reason is All but not Enough:
Victor Klemperer's The Lesser Evil completes his three volume diary as a Jewish college professor in Germany from 1933 to 1959. In this volume, he covers the years from the end of the Second World War until his final illness and to my mind provides the most rewarding literary experience. To be sure, his account of the tightening Nazi noose following Hitler's ascension to power and the horrors and restrictions of the war years as a Jew married to an "Aryan" woman have few equals in Holocaust literature. Only the fire bombing of Dresden on the eve of a scheduled deportation of his city's remaining handful of Jews and their spouses allowed him to survive. But the post-war years provide the fascinating portrait of a genteel intellectual dedicated to the rule of reason (a major scholarly pursuit as a Professor of Romance Languages and Literature involves his work on the French Enlightenment) trying to balance between the resurgent militarism and consumerism of the triumphant western powers and the repression of a socialist German Democratic Republic, the title's "lesser evil" where he chooses to live. Klemperer is keenly aware of his own inconsistencies as a secular humanist with a deep appreciation of traditional spiritual values, often describing his situation as one of falling between the two chairs of the East-West confrontation that became the Cold War. In 1951, the grieving widower remarries within a year, feeling both guilt and gratitude and humbled by two women more talented and generous than himself. Hardly heroic, he manages to seem admirable as he struggles to keep afloat despite terrible times and petty academic politics.