Otto Klemperer | The Annoyatorium (May 14, 1885-July 6, 1973) Born in Breslau, Germany (now Poland) Recorded ##1770>Beethoven</a>â€™s symphonies and â€˜Missa Solemnis,â€™ ##3478>Brahms</a>â€™ â€˜German Requiem,â€™ ##3466>Bruckner</a> and Mahler symphonies, ##1750>Bach</a>â€™s â€˜St. Matthew Passionâ€™ and operas of ##1756>Mozart</a> and ##1813>Wagner</a> Father of ##4565>Werner Klemperer</a> WHY HE MIGHT BE ANNOYING He was known for his unbelievably slow tempos. He was a notorious horn-dog and womanizer. He insisted on being called â€˜Dr. Klemperer.â€™ He was mentally unbalanced. He would disappear after concerts and be found in the gutter.

He abandoned his wife and went on a â€˜Thelma and Louiseâ€™ style road trip across the U.S., ringing up debts along the way. He was eventually arrested. His daughter had to clean up all his crazy messes. He once fell asleep smoking a pipe, then burned himself trying to put the fire out with whiskey. WHY HE MIGHT NOT BE ANNOYING His mental problems were caused by a brain tumor. He left Germany when the Nazis took over. He was blacklisted by ##775>Joe McCarthy</a>. He was friends with the great composer Gustav Mahler. He supported many experimental composers, including ##4974>Stravinsky</a>, Paul Hindemeth and Arnold SchÃ¶nberg. Heâ€™s considered one of the greatest 20th-century conductors. The fruit of his loins was TVâ€™s uproarious Colonel Klink, ##4565>Werner Klemperer</a>.

Otto Klemperer | Article about Otto Klemperer by The Free Dictionary Otto Klemperer | Article about Otto Klemperer by The Free Dictionary Related to Otto Klemperer: Bruno Walter , Herbert von Karajan Otto Klemperer Composer Klemperer, Otto (ô`tō klĕm`pərər), 1885–1973, German conductor, b. Breslau. Klemperer studied in Frankfurt and Berlin. Working first in Prague, he later conducted the Berlin State Opera (1927–33), introducing new works by Janáček, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Hindemith. With the rise of the Nazi regime, he went to the United States where he conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic (1933–39). Klemperer was celebrated for his interpretations of Beethoven, Mahler, and Richard Strauss. In 1938 he directed the reorganization of the Pittsburgh Orchestra. In 1946 he returned to Europe, where he conducted in Hungary, Germany, and England. Bibliography See his Minor Recollections (1964).

Klemperer, Otto Born May 14, 1885, in Breslau, present-day Wroclaw, Poland; died July 7, 1973, in Zürich. German conductor. Klemperer began his training at the conservatory in Frankfurt am Main in 1901; he later studied in Berlin. He made his debut in 1906. Klemperer conducted at opera houses in Prague, Hamburg, Strasbourg, Cologne, and Wiesbaden. He was a conductor at the Berlin Kroll Opera from 1927 to 1931 and at the Berlin State Opera from 1931 to 1933. He left Germany in 1933 and became the conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic (USA); he held this position until 1939. From 1947 to 1950, Klemperer directed the Budapest Opera House; at the same time, he and W. Felsenstein staged the opera Carmen at the Berlin Comic Opera Theater. He lived in London and worked with the London Philharmonic until his death.

In 1961 and 1962, Klemperer was responsible (as conductor and director) for the staging of the operas Fidelio by Beethoven and The Magic Flute by Mozart at Covent Garden. He toured many countries and performed several times in the USSR (first time in 1924.). Klemperer was one of the most important conductors of the 20th century. His interpretations were distinguished by their breadth and profound understanding of the composers’ intentions. His talents were best revealed in his interpretations of Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, and Mozart. Klemperer wrote several works, including the opera Das Ziel, symphonies, Masses, works for piano, and vocal and instrumental pieces. WORKS Otto Klemperer : definition of Otto Klemperer and synonyms of Otto Klemperer (English) 7 External links Biography Otto Klemperer was born in Breslau , Silesia Province , then in Germany (now Wrocław, Poland ), as a son of Nathan Klemperer, a native of Prague, Bohemia (today's Czech Republic).

Klemperer studied music first at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt , and later at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin under James Kwast and Hans Pfitzner . He followed Kwast to three institutions and credited him with the whole basis of his musical development. [2] In 1905 he met Gustav Mahler while conducting the off-stage brass at a performance of Mahler's Symphony No. 2, 'Resurrection' . He also made a piano reduction of the second symphony. [3] The two men became friends, and Klemperer became conductor at the German Opera in Prague in 1907 on Mahler's recommendation. [4] Mahler wrote a short testimonial, recommending Klemperer, on a small card which Klemperer kept for the rest of his life. Later, in 1910, Klemperer assisted Mahler in the premiere of his Symphony No. 8 , Symphony of a Thousand.

Klemperer went on to hold a number of positions, in Hamburg (1910–1912); in Barmen (1912–1913); the Strasbourg Opera (1914–1917); the Cologne Opera (1917–1924); and the Wiesbaden Opera House (1924–1927). From 1927 to 1931, he was conductor at the Kroll Opera in Berlin. In this post he enhanced his reputation as a champion of new music, playing a number of new works, including Leoš Janáček 's From the House of the Dead , Arnold Schönberg 's Erwartung , Igor Stravinsky 's Oedipus rex , and Paul Hindemith 's Cardillac . In 1933, once the Nazi Party had reached power, Klemperer, who was Jewish , left Germany and moved to the United States. Klemperer had previously converted to Catholicism, but returned to Judaism at the end of his life.[ citation needed ] In the U.S.

he was appointed Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic . He took United States citizenship in 1937. In Los Angeles, he began to concentrate more on the standard works of the Germanic repertoire that would later bring him greatest acclaim, particularly the works of Beethoven , Brahms and Mahler, though he gave the Los Angeles premieres of some of fellow Los Angeles resident Arnold Schoenberg's works with the Philharmonic. He also visited other countries, including England and Australia. While the orchestra responded well to his leadership, Klemperer had a difficult time adjusting to Southern California, a situation exacerbated by repeated manic-depressive episodes, reportedly as a result of severe cyclothymic bipolar disorder . Then, after completing the 1939 Los Angeles Philharmonic summer season at the Hollywood Bowl , Klemperer was visiting Boston and was diagnosed with a brain tumor; the subsequent brain surgery to remove "a tumour the size of a small orange" left him partially paralyzed. He went into a depressive state and was placed in institution; when he escaped, The New York Times ran a cover story declaring him missing, and after being found in New Jersey, a picture of him behind bars was printed in the Herald Tribune.

Though he would occasionally conduct the Philharmonic after that, he lost the post of Music Director. [5] Furthermore, his erratic behavior during manic episodes made him an undesirable guest to US orchestras, and the late flowering of his career centered in other countries. Klemperer (l.) with members of the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra, 1954 Following the end of World War II, Klemperer returned to Continental Europe to work at the Budapest Opera (1947–1950). Finding Communist rule in Hungary increasingly irksome, he became an itinerant conductor, guest conducting the Royal Danish Orchestra , Montreal Symphony Orchestra , Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra , Concertgebouw Orchestra , and the Philharmonia of London. His career was turned around in 1954 by the London-based producer Walter Legge , who recorded Klemperer in Beethoven, Brahms and much else with his hand-picked orchestra, the Philharmonia, for the EMI label. He became the first principal conductor of the Philharmonia in 1959. He settled in Switzerland.

Klemperer also worked at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden , sometimes stage-directing as well as conducting, as in a 1963 production of Richard Wagner 's Lohengrin . He also conducted Mozart's The Magic Flute there in 1963. A severe fall during a visit to Montreal forced Klemperer subsequently to conduct seated in a chair. A severe burning accident further paralyzed him, which resulted from his smoking in bed and trying to douse the flames with the contents of a bottle of spirits of camphor nearby. Through Klemperer's problems with his health, the tireless and unwavering support and assistance of Klemperer's daughter Lotte was crucial to his success. One of his last concert tours was to Jerusalem. Klemperer had performed in Palestine before the state of Israel declared its independence, and returned to Jerusalem only in 1970 to conduct the Israeli Broadcasting Authority Symphonic Orchestra in two concerts, performing the six Brandenburg Concerti and Mozart's symphonies 39, 40 and 41. During this tour he took Israeli citizenship. He retired from conducting in 1971.

Klemperer died in Zurich , Switzerland in 1973, aged 88, and was buried in Zurich's Israelitischer Friedhof-Oberer Friesenberg. He was an Honorary Member (HonRAM) of the Royal Academy of Music . His son, Werner Klemperer , was an actor and became known for his portrayal of Colonel Klink on the US television show Hogan's Heroes . The diarist Victor Klemperer was a cousin; so were Georg Klemperer and Felix Klemperer , who were famous physicians. Composer Klemperer is less well known as a composer, but he wrote a number of pieces, including six symphonies , a Mass , nine string quartets , many lieder and the opera Das Ziel. He seldom performed any of these himself and they have generally fallen into neglect since his death, although his works have received the occasional commercial recording. [6] Klemperer's recordings Klemperer around 1920. Many listeners associate Klemperer with slow tempos, but recorded evidence now available on compact disc shows that in earlier years his tempi could be quite a bit faster; the late recordings give a misleading impression.

For example, one of Klemperer's most noted performances was of Beethoven 's Symphony No. 3 , the Eroica. Eric Grunin's Eroica Project contains tempo data on 363 recordings of the work from 1924–2007, and includes 10 by Klemperer - some recorded in the studio, most from broadcasts of live concerts. The earliest Klemperer performance on tape was recorded in concert in Köln in 1954 (when he was 69 years old); the last was in London with the New Philharmonia Orchestra in 1970 (when he was 85). The passing years show a clear trend with respect to tempo: as Klemperer aged, he took slower tempi. In 1954, his first movement lasts 15:18 from beginning to end; in 1970 it lasts 18:41. In 1954 the main tempo of the first movement was about 135 beats per minute, in 1970 it had slowed to about 110 beats per minute.

In 1954, the Eroica second movement, "Funeral March", had a timing of 14:35; in 1970, it had slowed to 18:51. Similar slowings took place in the other movements. Around 1954, Herbert von Karajan flew especially to hear Klemperer conduct a performance of the Eroica, and later he said to him: "I have come only to thank you, and say that I hope I shall live to conduct the Funeral March as well as you have done". Similar, if less extreme, reductions in tempi can be noted in many other works for which Klemperer left multiple recordings, at least in recordings from when he was in his late 70s and his 80s. For example: (a) the Symphony No. 38 ("Prague") of Mozart, another Klemperer specialty. In his concert recording from December 1950 (when he was 65 years old) with the RIAS Berlin Orchestra the timings are I. 9:45 (with repeat timing omitted; the performance actually does take the repeat); II.

7:45; and III. 5.24. In his studio March, 1962 recording of the same work with the Philharmonia (recorded when he was 77 years old), the timings are notably slower: I. 10:53 (no repeat was taken); II. 8.58; III. 6:01. Unlike the late Eroica, the 1962 Prague is not notably slow; rather, the 1950 recording is much faster than most recordings of the work, even by "historically informed" conductors. (b) The Anton Bruckner Symphony no. 4 (Haas edition with emendations). A 1947 concert recording with Concertgebouw Orchestra has timings of I. 14:03; II. 12:58; III. 10:11; and IV. 17.48. The studio recording with the Philharmonia from 1963 has timings of I. 16:09; II; 14:00; III. 11.48; IV. 19:01.

Again, the 1963 is not a notably slow performance, but the 1947 was quick. The March 1951 recording with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra was even quicker: I. 13:26; II. 11:56; III. 9:22; IV. 16:30. (c) The Mahler Symphony No. 7, recorded by Angel Records."Thus, as you listen to this performance, it seems... to enclose you within its own world of evocative sound, a world that echoes... the world we may know, but remains a world transformed by imagination, remote, and complete within itself." [7] Regardless of tempo, Klemperer's performances often maintain great intensity. Eric Grunin, in a commentary on the "opinions" page of his Eroica Project, notes: "....The massiveness of the first movement of the Eroica is real, but is not its main claim on our attention. That honor goes to its astonishing story (structure), and what is to me most unique about Klemperer is that his understanding of the structure remains unchanged no matter what his tempo...

" Discography Klemperer made many recordings, and many have become classics. Among those worthy of note are: ^ Walton, Chris (2005). "CD Reviews: Klemperer, Symphony No. 1 et al." . Tempo 59 (232): 56–58. . Retrieved 2008-09-27. ^ RCM, High Fidelity Magazine, December 1969. Bibliography Brown, Jonathan (2012). Great Wagner Conductors – a listener’s companion. O’Connor, A.C.T.: Parrot Press. Chapter 22 is devoted to Klemperer; includes discography. ISBN 978-0-9871556-0-3 Heyworth, Peter (1996). Otto Klemperer: His Life and Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-56538-3 . Holden, Raymond (2005). The Virtuoso Conductors: The Central European Tradition from Wagner to Karajan. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press.

ISBN 0-300-09326-8 . Cosman, Milein (1957). Musical Sketchbook. Oxford: Bruno Cassirer. OCLC 3225493 . External links The Jew Who Fought to Stay German The Jew Who Fought to Stay German By AMOS ELON N A BLEAK DAY IN MAY 1942, a 61-year-old disenfranchised German Jew named Victor Klemperer, trapped in Nazi Germany, noted in his diary: "I continue to write. This is my heroics. I want to bear witness, precise witness, until the very end." He was a former professor of Romance languages at the Technical University of Dresden and had escaped deportation to the death camps in the east only because he was married to an "Aryan" woman. Gestapo agents, on a routine checkup, had just ransacked his room in one of the cramped "Jews' houses" on the outskirts of Dresden to which he and his wife had been confined after the confiscation of his house.

Fortunately for him, the searchers had overlooked the last pages of the diary he had been keeping since 1933; its discovery would have meant certain death. Instead, he was only beaten. His wife, Eva, a former concert pianist, was kicked and spat upon and screamed at: "Du Judenhurel!" ("You Jew's whore!"). When the Gestapo left, Klemperer was able to return to his diary. He felt that he must record everything quickly after the event, every small detail, every passing mood, every incident in what he called "the sheer fairy-tale horror" of life under the Nazi tyranny: "Observe, study, record everything that happens -- tomorrow it'll look different, tomorrow it will feel differently. Seize it as it happens and feels." Klemperer's "Diaries 1933-1945" were published last fall in Germany to general acclaim and to some argument. The acclaim was a result of Victor Klemperer's evocative literary gift, his power of observation.

No one, including those who toward the end of the war tried to assassinate Hitler, had been so clearsighted from the very first as he had been about the unmitigated horror of Nazism and the ruin it would bring upon Germany. But in a country still torn between guilt and shame and a desire to finally "draw a line" separating the past, there was also controversy about Klemperer that highlighted some of the problems Germans, inevitably, still have with themselves. The fact that Klemperer -- in his extreme state of segregation and isolation -- knew as early as March 1942 of the existence of the death camps at Auschwitz and wrote about it in his diary was heralded by one reviewer as yet another proof that knowledge of the mass murders "was much more widespread than had been assumed so far." Marcel Reich-Ranicki, perhaps the leading German literary critic, announced on television that no one would ever again be entitled to claim he or she "did not know." If Klemperer, in his isolation, knew, most Germans must have known, too.

This, and the surprising fact that Klemperer remained a "German patriot" almost to the bitter end -- he regarded the Nazis as "un-German" -- added heat and interest to the publication of his diaries. Some of the reviews echoed the ongoing discussion in Germany over what it means nowadays "to be a German": the quarrel between those who deplore the sharp decline of patriotism after the war and those who wish only to be German-speaking Europeans, between those who would like Germany to act once more like a big power and those who, for reasons of personal comfort or ease, would prefer her to be little more than a large Switzerland. The Klemperer diaries were long considered lost or suppressed by the Communist authorities of East Germany. Klemperer had chosen to live there after the war because he believed that the East German Communists were more thorough in their persecution of Nazi criminals than the West Germans. After Klemperer's death in 1960, his widow deposited the work in the Dresden Landesarchiv. A former student of Klemperer's named Walter Nowojski recognized its literary and political merit.

In the 1980's he began to decipher and transcribe the difficult manuscript (more than 5,000 pages tightly filled with minute script). For Nowojski this was a labor of love. "I had little hope at the time that the diaries would ever be published," he said recently. The East German authorities (among the most hard-line Communists in the Soviet bloc) would not have liked Klemperer's acid remarks on the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. They would have resented his equation of Bolshevist and Nazi propaganda. Klemperer's picture of Nazism differed radically from theirs. The official Communist view was that Nazism had been an alliance of "grand capitalists" and "grand militarists" working together to suppress the "working class." From Klemperer's diaries, Nazism emerges as a movement of dour, petit-bourgeois Archie Bunkers led by state-paid gangsters and terrorists. When the diaries finally came out last autumn, five years after the fall of the Berlin wall, they were, not surprisingly, compared with the diaries of Anne Frank. Yet Klemperer's spare and precise text contains no trace of sentimentality.

And there is nothing naive in it except, perhaps, the author's burning faith in Germany and German Kultur. This faith of his survived some very bad moments during the Third Reich. Only toward the very end was it beginning to shake like teeth in an old man's mouth. Klemperer was the son of a small-town Reform rabbi. In the assimilationist parlance of the time, his father was known as a Landprediger (country preacher). Klemperer had four brothers -- one a prominent lawyer, another a famous surgeon called as a consultant to Lenin's deathbed. All five converted as young men to the Lutheran faith, not necessarily because they were true believers but because it was the leading national religion. The conductor Otto Klemperer was their cousin. Even after Hitler's victory in the elections of 1933, Klemperer continued to consider himself a German patriot, referring often to his Deutschtum, or German-ness. ("I am forever German, a German 'nationalist,' " he wrote in July 1935.

"The Nazis are un-German.") A year after being compelled, to his utter horror, to display the yellow Judenstern on his outer coat, he wrote: "I am now fighting the hardest battle for my Deutschtum. I must hold on to it: I am German. The others are not. I must hold on to it. The spirit decides, not the blood. I must hold on to it: Zionism on my part would have been a comedy which baptism was not." Like many completely assimilated Jews in Wilhelminian and Weimar Germany, he believed that Germans were, as he put it, a "chosen people," culturally and politically superior to others. "I still feel more shame than fear," he wrote in 1934. "Shame for Germany." Convincing themselves somehow that Nazism would not last, Victor and Eva Klemperer did not emigrate, as his brothers and cousin did. He and his wife even decided in 1935 to build themselves a little house in the village of Dolzschen in the hills above Dresden.

At this time they already had to comply with a new Nazi ordinance that all country houses must have a tilted "Germanic" gable (flat roofs were verboten as alien, or "decadent" Bauhaus). The house, though small, had one room large enough to accommodate Eva's grand piano. Klemperer must have been one of the very few people of Jewish origin in Nazi Germany who invested most of their savings in German real estate at a time when others were running for their lives. He deluded himself that converts and war veterans like himself would be spared. Much later he would write: "I escaped, I dug myself into my profession. I held my lectures and obsessively overlooked the fact that the benches before me grew emptier and emptier." Summarily dismissed from his post as a professor at the university, he filled his free time with getting a driver's license and buying a car, in which he and his wife toured the lovely countryside of Thuringen and Sachsen.

In 1937, still proud of the Distinguished Service Medal he had won in World War I, he confessed: "I myself have had too much nationalism in me and I am now being punished for it." In 1938 he felt chastised by the recent Nuremberg racial laws and yet, after driving with his wife through the lovely hill country southeast of Dresden, he noted, "How beautiful this Germany might have been if one could still feel German and be proud of being one." In 1942, already a slave worker relegated to a kind of ghetto on the outskirts of Dresden, he assured one of his fellow inmates that "fanaticism" was "un-German" by definition. Fleeing Dresden in February 1945, after the great Allied bombardment that leveled the city in a single night, he finally lost faith not only in Germany but in the entire human race. Yet not for long. Eva Klemperer tore the yellow Judenstern off her husband's coat. Under assumed names they survived in the countryside until the liberation.

The two fat diary volumes -- 1,620 pages, costing 98 Deutschmarks (about $65) -- have been a best seller in Germany for months (100,000 copies in six printings so far, according to Aufbau, the publisher). Klemperer had a novelist's eye for detail. His trained philologist's ear was tuned to every changing inflection in the corrupted language of totalitarianism. There are frequent entries in the diary headlined "L.T.I." (Lingua Tertii Imperii, Klemperer's term for the language of the Third Reich) and filled with examples of Nazi words and their analysis. For its cool, lucid style and power of observation, Klemperer's diary has been hailed as a document of rare authenticity -- the best-written, most evocative, most observant record of daily life in the Third Reich, not solely from the vantage point of a victim. Klemperer's ambition was to be the "cultural historian of the present catastrophe" (Jan. 10, 1942). In this he was entirely successful.

His main theme is the uniqueness of the Nazi tyranny: "There is nothing spontaneous. All is methodical and orderly, organized 'cultivated' cruelty, and it happens hypocritically, mendaciously in the name of Kultur." Day in, day out, Klemperer comments on current affairs: on Hitler's speeches ("his favorite foreign words are 'discrimination' and 'defamation' ") and the elimination of all opposition, on the racial laws, on the war's progress. There are vivid accounts of events he witnesses, conversations he overhears and many character studies of victims and victimizers, fanatics and opportunists of all sorts. All this, and the ever-narrowing horizons of his own private world, produces a nightmarish picture of life within a national society gone berserk; the inferno is an artful mosaic, made up of endless fragments of meanness (and a few isolated acts of kindness). Hitler's rise to power is described as the result of a chaotic mixture of nihilism and masochism, a rebellion against authority and at the same time a neurotic submission to it.

"It is amazing," Klemperer notes soon after Hitler's election as Reichskanzler, "how everything collapses . . . terror is accepted. It's shocking how all opposition has disappeared. No one dares any more to speak up." Klemperer's own private attempt to hold the beast at bay by recording its acts and by exposing its corrupted language continued to the end, an undertaking as crazy, as courageous and as endearing as that of the little barber in Chaplin's "Great Dictator." Life in a concentration camp would have been worse, of course. Since he was not deported to Auschwitz or even confined in Dachau, Klemperer was, in a sense, a privileged Jew. Nevertheless, the daily account of how his own living space narrows and diminishes step by step is harrowing enough. First, his students stop registering for his courses; then he loses his professorship. His colleagues begin not to recognize him in the street. ("They evade me like the plague." July 15, 1936). Then, his telephone is disconnected; his driver's license is revoked; his food rations are cut to a minimum of cabbage and potatoes. His typewriter is taken away.

Banned from the university library, he is forced to give up his scientific work. He is ordered to adopt a new first name: he must call himself Israel Victor Klemperer or face deportation to a concentration camp. He and his wife have to vacate their little house in Dolzschen (but continue to pay taxes on it and all repairs). For the remaining years of the war they are moved from one Judenhaus to another, where several "mixed" families crowd into a single apartment. They must kill their cat, for Jews are not allowed to keep pets. Klemperer cannot buy flowers, books, tobacco, newspapers or shaving cream ("Jews are supposed to grow beards"). He is pressed into forced labor; he shovels snow and works in a Dresden factory. He must walk to work (nearly four miles each way) since the use of all public transportation is forbidden to Jews. In September 1941, made for the first time to display the yellow Judenstern on his outer coat, he registers "a raving attack of despair." He suffers from pains in his chest from angina pectoris. Of an otherwise robust constitution, he sleeps well at night.

His nightmares start when he wakes up. He expects to be deported at any moment. He occasionally scavenges the garbage for food. A few elderly people, seeing the Judenstern on his coat, come up in the dark and silently shake his hand in sympathy. Others, mostly young, spit at him or scream foul epithets. When a neighbor remarks that Klemperer, in his isolation, would hardly be able to cover in his diary the "main events" like the war, he writes: "The main events aren't as important for my record as is the every-day of the tyranny, which might be forgotten. A thousand gnat bites are worse than a blow on the head. I observe, I note the gnat bites." Maintaining the diary and getting it out of the house periodically to a safe hiding place took on life-and-death importance. The diary was his "balancing rod without which I would crash into the abyss." After 1941, he was pressed into work as a slave laborer.

"In times of utter disgust and despair, in the endless dreariness of mechanical factory work, at the bedside of the sick and the dying, at the tombs, in moments of extreme oppression, humiliation and disgrace, the demand I directed at myself was to observe and record. It always helped." His wife's help was, of course, crucial too. She took the risk of carrying his notes to the house of an old friend, where they were hidden in a suitcase. Eva Klemperer suffered from frequent nervous breakdowns, attacks of neuralgic pain and bouts of deep depression. She was a truly heroic woman who shared her husband's humiliations and saved him from the worst -- the death camps. The diary is a moving testimony to their love, the story of a close partnership that no hardship and terror could break. I SPENT SOME TIME IN GERMANY LAST MONTH talking about the diaries to university people, writers and literary critics. All agreed that one reason for their appeal was, of course, their literary quality. The other reason was said to be political. Henryk M.

Broder, a columnist for Der Spiegel magazine, says Klemperer's diaries are like litmus paper: they can be employed to test the reactions of people to some key notions that have recently come under much discussion in Germany: identity, nationalism, "German-ness," Heimat (homeland), "pride of Fatherland" and patriotism. Decried in the past, mainly by liberals, these are being increasingly hailed as "positive" values in the aftermath of German reunification. Before reunification, liberal Germans often maintained that Germany was no longer a nation-state. Even some conservatives were ready to concede that nationalism had been the gravedigger of Europe, and of Germany, in two World Wars. Liberals upheld Verfassungspatriotism (patriotism linked not to the German nation but to the liberal West German constitution adopted in 1949 with the blessings of the Anglo-American-French occupation powers). After reunification, more and more people said that Germany must adopt a new "national agenda." Rich, powerful and located in the heart of Europe, the country could no longer hide behind the skirts of the United States.

Germany was said to have become a nation-state again, entitled to throw its weight about. Fifty years after the war, Germany had the right, once again, to be proud of itself -- not of Nazism, of course, but of its more distant past and of its present, its thriving economy, its free democratic institutions, its culture. For those who deplored the lack of national pride among Germans in the postwar period, the moving diaries of a terrorized, disenfranchised Jew who continued to be proud of his Deutschtum struck a welcome chord. The film maker Hans-Jurgen Syberberg welcomed it as a document vindicating his yearnings for the irrational "creative power" of Heimat and Volk. Martin Walser, one of Germany's best-known novelists (formerly a Communist sympathizer, now a neoconservative), found in Klemperer's life and Weltanschauung convenient means to propagate his own German Dream. Klemperer had already appeared in one of his novels in 1991.

Last year, Walser raised a fury of protests when he publicly argued that one reason for the spread of skinhead violence and right-wing xenophobia in Germany was a general neglect of Heimat and patriotism. After reading the diaries, Walser hailed Klemperer as the "ideal human figure in the German memory-conflict." Klemperer had proudly "upheld his Deutschtum and Deutschsein during the 12 years of legalized Gestapo terror." Klemperer was recently awarded posthumously the prestigious Geschwister Scholl Prize for Civic Courage. (Sophie and Hans Scholl, two young students, were executed in 1943 for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets.) Walser happened to be the main speaker at the award ceremony. This could not have been accidental. He devoted nearly his entire speech to the proposition that the memory of Auschwitz must not be allowed to destroy the possibility of renewed Jewish assimilation within German nationhood and culture. Klemperer was his star witness. Even Klemperer's conversion to Protestantism "independent of all religious feeling had been an act of emancipation," Walser insisted.

He is encouraged by the upward trend in Jewish immigration to Germany (the number of Jews in Germany has more than doubled in recent years) and by the moving example of Klemperer's attachment to Germany. Walser went on to suggest that the project of Jewish assimilation ought to be taken up once again. The so-called German-Jewish symbiosis had not necessarily been a tragicomic self-delusion, as Gershom Scholem and many others had claimed. Nor was it necessarily one-sided. The tragedy had not been inevitable. Walser's speech caused a stir. The philosopher Jurgen Habermas, visibly angry, walked out of the assembly hall. A few days later Habermas protested in the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper against Walser's attempt to whitewash the tragic dimension of the Jewish experience in Germany with a "mouthful of self-congratulations" and the evocation of an "obscenely harmonized German-Jewish culture." I spent a day in Dresden recently, walking up the road to the village of Dolzschen, where Klemperer and his wife had built their little house in 1934 and to which they returned to live after the liberation.

The house still has its "gable" in the regulation Germanic style. But the village, which was long ago incorporated into the nearby city, has lost the rural character that the Klemperers so loved. Their rose garden and fruit trees have disappeared. Dresden was known before the war as the "Florence of the North." Very little of its baroque splendor remains. The view of Dresden today from the surrounding hills is almost as bleak as that of, say, Kaliningrad or of some other Communist city quickly rebuilt after the war -- drab, monotonous and shabby. Some of the main thoroughfares that were cut through the old city after the war are wide enough to allow eight tanks abreast to pass a reviewing stand. There are plans to narrow them. Downtown, in the old city center, dark smog hung between the dilapidated houses, turning the sunlight a sickly brown-yellow. Dresden is still only the torso of a city. Some of the better-known historical buildings that Klemperer loved were carefully restored, based on photographs and on Canaletto paintings. They are surrounded today by a ramshackle Marxist version of Dallas. Gaping voids remain.

More than 50 years after the terrible air bombardment that killed 135,000 people -- and saved Klemperer's life -- many scars and wounds endure. As I turned the corner into the wide Pragerstrasse, I ran into 100 or so men and women, mostly young, chanting slogans. They were protesting the recent daubing, presumably by skinheads or neo-Nazis, of tombstones in an old Jewish cemetery. On their heavy overcoats and parkas many displayed yellow cardboard Judensterns, a gesture that attracted the attention of onlookers. The yellow stars gave the place a haunted, ghostly quality. Amos Elon, author of "Journey Through a Haunted Land," abook about Germany, writes frequently on the Middle East and Europe. Excerpts From the Diary of Victor Klemperer March 10, 1933 . . . Hitler elected as Chancellor. What I had called terror was only a mild prelude. . . . It is amazing how everything collapses . . . prohibitions and acts of violence. And with it, on streets and radio, unrestrained propaganda.

On Saturday I heard a piece of Hitler's speech in Konsigsberg. I understood only a few words. But the tone! The unctuous roaring bark, the bark, really, of a clergyman. . . . How long will I be able to retain my professorship? March 17, 1933 . . . on Friday, unfortunately, Thiemes was here. It was frightful . . . such enthusiastic conviction and support. The phraseology of unity. Progress piously repeated. Grete (his wife) said, "Everything else failed, now we have to blow this horn." He corrected her vehemently. "We didn't have to." In really free elections he has voted for the right cause. This I can't forgive him. The poor dog may be frightened for his job. He must howl with the wolves. But why in front of me? . . . Naked violence, breach of law, terrible hypocrisy, unmitigated barbarism poses as law. April 25, 1933 The focus of the Hitlerite movement is undoubtedly the Jewish cause. I fail to understand why on their agenda this item is so central. It means their ultimate ruin. But probably our ruin as well.

Feb. 11, 1936 Outside the post office a man stopped me. "Don't you recognize me? Dr. Kleinstock, rector of the Vitztum High School. I saw you the other day too. You also saw me but you looked away. I was afraid you looked away because you feared I wouldn't greet you. That's why I stopped you to ask, How are you?" I was moved by his attitude. I answered and added, "I was told that you, Herr Rector, are a top-Nazi now." He: "Oh my God, one can never please everybody." July 19, 1937 I myself have had too much nationalism in me and now I am being punished. Sept. 15, 1941 (after Jews were ordered to display the yellow Star of David) Frau Kreidl Sr. was in tears. Frau Voss suffered a heart attack. Friedheim said this was the most difficult blow to date, worse than the confiscation of capital. I feel shattered, and cannot calm myself. Eva wants to take care of all errands from now on. I will leave the house only at night for a few moments.

April 29, 1942 Another house search, another suicide. Dr. Korn -- a surgeon, Catholic Jew, wife Aryan -- was beaten up in the street. He was ordered to present himself next morning at the Gestapo. Suicide during the night. The head of the search party: "We'll see to it that nobody among you comes out of this alive." May 27, 1942 This afternoon these pages go to Pirna. My latest fear is that there, too, they are not absolutely safe. . . . If discovered there, these manuscripts . . . would destory Eva and me. The danger is so great and constantly present that I have become fatalistic. This manuscript is my duty and my ultimate fulfillment. May 30, 1942 We spoke this morning about the unbelievable human capacity to endure and get accustomed.

The fairy-tale horror of our existence: fear of every knock at the door, abuse, disgrace, hunger, prohibitions, the gruesome enslavement, daily approaching dangers, every day new victims all around, absolute helplessness -- and yet still hours of ease, reading, work, eating more and more miserable food, one vegetates and again one hopes. June 21, 1942 The empty garden bench outside of my window gives me pain. Ernst Kreidl and Dr. Friedheim sat there last summer. Now Kreidl has been shot dead and Friedheim has "died" in jail. June 25, 1942 Mornings are the worst. Everything crowds in on you. Will I be beaten and spat at today? Summoned? Arrested? Arrest now means certain death.

Question: What was the occupation of Otto Klemperer?
Answer: Conductor