I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941 Essay | Critical Essay #2

I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941 Critical Essay #2

In the following review, Tennenbaum shares her experience reading Klemperer's diary, stating "nothing I had read before made the years of Nazi terror so real."

The closer we get to the millennium, the clearer it becomes that the Holocaust is the defining event of our century. The unspeakable suffering the German nation under Hitler inflicted on the Jews has become the model we refer to when we speak of man's inhumanity to man. We still suffer its aftershocks. It called into question our trust in "civilization" and created a disquietude between Germans and Jews that may take another hundred years to dispel. It is hardly surprising, then, that the Holocaust brought forth a vast outpouring of literature. The victims often clung to hope with a vow to "tell the world what went on here." But when liberation arrived at long last, an odd thing happened. Although the discovery of...
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