LTI: A Philologist's Notebook

Victor Klemperer was a German professor of Romance philology, lecturer, researcher of 18th-century French literature, and journalist. In the 1930s, the Nazis deprived him of the opportunity to give lectures, publish, and visit libraries. Under these circumstances, he continued to work and also began to keep a diary.

Victor Klemperer was saved from deportation to a concentration camp by the "Aryan descent" of his wife, the pianist and artist Eva Schlemmer. In 1940, the family was forced to move to a ghetto-house, the so-called "Jewish house." At the end of the war, when the privileges for "mixed marriages" ceased to apply, the family fled persecution under threat of being sent to a concentration camp and hid in a village.

As Victor Klemperer himself writes, his notes on the language of the Third Reich saved his morale throughout the entire period of Nazi rule. The observations and reflections collected in his diaries formed the basis for the publication of the book "LTI — The Language of the Third Reich" in 1947.

After the war, Victor Klemperer worked in East Germany. He lived until 1960.

In 1995, Victor Klemperer was posthumously awarded the Hans and Sophie Scholl Literary Prize for his diaries, which are an important document of the suffering of the Jewish people under the Nazi regime, at the University of Munich.

"— Daddy," the boy asks at the circus, "what is that man doing on the rope with a pole?" — You silly goose, that's a balancing pole, he's holding onto it. — Oh, Daddy, what if he drops that pole? — You silly goose, he's holding onto it! Throughout these years, my diary repeatedly became my balancing pole, without which I would have fallen a hundred times. In hours of disgust and hopelessness, in the endless boredom of mechanical factory work, sitting by the beds of the sick and dying, standing by graves, in my own misfortune, in moments of extreme humiliation, with a physically ailing heart — I was always pulled through by this demand on myself: observe, study, remember what is happening — tomorrow everything will be different, tomorrow you will feel everything differently; preserve within yourself how it manifests itself and how it works right now. And very soon this call — to place oneself above circumstances and preserve one's inner freedom — condensed into an ever-effective secret formula: LTI, LTI!"