I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941 by
Victor Klemperer, translated by Martin Chalmers Random House,
519 pp., $29.95 Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten:
Tagebücher 1933-1945 by Victor Klemperer, edited by Walter
Nowojski Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, two volumes, 1,691 pp., DM128.00
One of the most remarkable studies of National Socialism in the
early postwar years was a small volume entitled LTI (Lingua
tertii imperii), which appeared in 1947. Written by a professor
of the Technical University of Dresden named Victor Klemperer,
it was a brilliantly conceived philological analysis that sought
to crystallize the meaning of Nazism from its official language.
Klemperer pointed out that, by a deliberate militarization and
mechanization of common speech, by the use of superlatives and
adjectives of enhancement, by giving positive value to terms
that in the past had been used pejoratively (fanaticism, blind
obedience), by expressed preference for feeling rather than
reason, by the use of euphem