# I Will Bear Witness, Volume 1 ![rw-book-cover](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61bnEf0hH1L._SL200_.jpg) ## Metadata - Author: [[Victor Klemperer]] - Full Title: I Will Bear Witness, Volume 1 - Category: #books ## Highlights - Again it’s astounding how easily everything collapses. ([Location 516](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01AQNZQ0E&location=516)) - Eight days before the election the clumsy business of the Reichstag fire—I cannot imagine that anyone really believes in Communist perpetrators instead of paid work. Then the wild prohibitions and acts of violence. And on top of that the never ending propaganda in the street, on the radio, etc. ([Location 518](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01AQNZQ0E&location=518)) - The Horst Wessel Song between the announcements.—An indignant denial, no harm will come to loyal Jews. Directly afterward the Central Association of Jewish Citizens in Thuringia is banned because it had criticized the government in “Talmudic fashion” and disparaged it. Since then day after day commissioners appointed, provincial governments trampled underfoot, flags raised, buildings taken over, people shot, newspapers banned, etc., etc. Yesterday the dramaturge Karl Wolf dismissed “by order of the Nazi Party”—not even in the name of the government—today the whole Saxon cabinet, etc., etc. A complete revolution and party dictatorship. And all opposing forces as if vanished from the face of the earth. It is this utter collapse of a power only recently present, no, its complete disappearance (just as in 1918) that I find so staggering. ([Location 527](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01AQNZQ0E&location=527)) - It is shocking how day after day naked acts of violence, breaches of the law, barbaric opinions appear quite undisguised as official decree. The Socialist papers are permanently banned. The “Liberals” tremble. ([Location 560](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01AQNZQ0E&location=560)) - I am now completely certain that Hindenburg is no more than a puppet, that his hand was already being guided on January 30. ([Location 579](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01AQNZQ0E&location=579)) - A mood of fear such as must have existed in France under the Jacobins. No one fears for their lives yet—but for bread and freedom. ([Location 608](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01AQNZQ0E&location=608)) - Meanwhile there is no bloodshed in the country, but oppression, oppression, oppression. No one breathes freely anymore, no free word, neither printed nor spoken. ([Location 615](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01AQNZQ0E&location=615)) - On Saturday red posters on the shops: “Recognized German-Christian enterprise.” In between them closed shops, SA men in front of them with triangular boards: “Whoever buys from the Jew supports the foreign boycott and destroys the German economy.”—People poured down Prager Strasse and looked at it all. That was the boycott. ([Location 652](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01AQNZQ0E&location=652)) - Everything I considered un-German, brutality, injustice, hypocrisy, mass suggestion to the point of intoxication, all of it flourishes here. ([Location 661](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01AQNZQ0E&location=661)) - for the first time in my life I feel political hatred for a group (as I did not during the war), a deadly hatred. ([Location 671](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01AQNZQ0E&location=671)) - Newspapers are read differently now […]. Between the lines. ([Location 684](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01AQNZQ0E&location=684)) - One is an alien species or a Jew with 25 percent Jewish blood, if one grandparent was Jewish. As in fifteenth-century Spain, but then the issue was faith. Today it’s zoology + business. ([Location 703](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01AQNZQ0E&location=703)) - Power, a tremendous power, is in the hands of the National Socialists. Half a million armed men, all offices and instruments of state, press and radio, the mood of the inebriated millions. I cannot see where salvation could come from. […] ([Location 719](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01AQNZQ0E&location=719)) - The fate of the Hitler movement will undoubtedly be decided by the Jewish business. I do not understand why they have made this point of their program so central. It will sink them. But we will probably go down with them. ([Location 754](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01AQNZQ0E&location=754)) - Atrocity stories are lies and severely punished. ([Location 785](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01AQNZQ0E&location=785)) - Sick joke, passed on by the Dembers: An immigrant to Palestine is asked, “Are you coming from conviction or from Germany?” ([Location 806](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01AQNZQ0E&location=806)) - I have noticed: Since June 20 government declarations no longer talk about “national awakening” (stage I) or about “national revolution” (stage II). Instead the new slogan is the desired “total state.” Under the “people’s chancellor.” On June 29 a Reich minister (Goebbels in Stuttgart) said for the first time in a public speech: We do not tolerate any parties apart from us, Hitler is “absolute master” in Germany (Hindenburg gone). ([Location 913](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01AQNZQ0E&location=913)) - “Less politics and more scholarship! And don’t give so much of yourself to this cause. Yours is scholarship—and one can never know what the future may bring politically. You understand me—my advice places me in your hands, I wish you well.” ([Location 1000](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01AQNZQ0E&location=1000))