Victor Klemperer was born October 9, 1881, in Landsberg-on-the-Warthe in the province of Brandenburg, Germany. Klemperer was the youngest in a family of three other brothers and four sisters. When Klemperer was nine, the family moved to Berlin, where his rabbi father, Wilhelm, was summoned to a liberal Reform Synagogue. As an unorthodox rabbi, Wilhelm was supportive of his four sons converting to the national religion, Luther-anism, in adulthood.

Klemperer married a concert pianist named Eva in 1906. His brothers disapproved of the union because they thought Eva was their brother's social inferior. As for Eva's family, some of her relatives disapproved of her marrying a Jewish man. During World War I, he served as a cannoneer in the German army, earning a Distinguished Service Medal. This service, along with his marriage to an Aryan woman, protected him from deportation to the concentration camps that sealed the fates of...