Edition: U.S. / Global

For Germans, TV Series On Nazi Era

Published: May 16, 1996


The diaries of Victor Klemperer, written as he endured the Third Reich in Dresden, have become a best seller in Germany since their publication last fall, because of their tight, evocative prose as well as their minutely detailed firsthand chronicling of the Nazi era.

The rights to an English-language edition were sold to Random House last month for a reported $500,000, said to be the highest sum paid in the United States for a work originally written in German.

But beyond the commercial success, the 1,620-page, two-volume "Diaries 1933-1945" has fed into the furor among intellectuals and literary critics here over the recently published "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust" by Daniel J. Goldhagen, a Harvard scholar.

Professor Goldhagen's study confronted Germans with the uncomfortable argument that Nazism and the Holocaust had sprung from a deep strain of specifically German anti-Semitism that sought the annihilation of Jews.

Mr. Klemperer's diaries, by contrast, have been cited by those preferring a less harsh judgment, because they mention rare interludes in which Germans went out of their way to greet Jews on the street.

Furthermore, Mr. Klemperer termed himself a "German patriot" whose belief that Nazism was "un-German" survived for many years after Hitler's rise to power in 1933.

But the idea that most Germans knew nothing about the death camps seems undermined by Mr. Klemperer's mention of the camps in his writings in 1942.

Mr. Klemperer died in 1960 in what was then East Germany. His diaries remained largely ignored for more than 20 years until a former student began transcribing them.

Maria Sommer, a Berlin agent handling the sale of film rights to Mr. Klemperer's diaries, said the 13-part dramatization would be "the biggest and most extensive" dramatization of the Holocaust years in Germany.