Hovering Over the Country

Looking around, there are few people old enough to have been soldiers in World War II, let alone held any responsibility for the Nazi regime. Yet the big "it" still hovers over Germany.

In Berlin you pass a government building with an historical marker out front indicating it had been Goering's headquarters during the war. You see the place where Claus von Stauffenberg and the other July 2oth conspirators were executed for their role in the (somewhat belated - it was 1944) plot to kill Hilter. You tour the Berlin Dom where SS Reinhard Heydrich had a massive state funeral after he was assassinated by Czech partisans.

"It" is everywhere.

In Dresden, I observed my own personal moment of silence for Kurt Vonnegut, whose literary career was so influenced by his experience there as a young American POW during the Dresden firebombing, which he turned into the fable Slaughterhouse Five.

And I also thought about a far more important - and far lesser known - work written in and about Dresden during the war.

Victor Klemperer was a Jewish academic in Dresden who kept a meticulous diary from 1933 through the end of the war in 1945.

He managed to survive because he was a privileged Jew, a World War I veteran and, more importantly, married to a Christian woman.

His two-volume diary, I Will Bear Witness, was published in the 1990's and is chilling, horrifically fascinating reading on what it was like for everyday people to witness the relentless, incremental changes that made life - both everyday life and life itself - worse and worse for the Jews of Germany as the noose was tightened and tugged.

It's been a while since I read the book, but a few of the details that have stuck with me over the years were Klemperer's noting when new laws were passed: Jews could no longer buy flowers. Jews could no longer have pets. Jews could no longer read newspapers.

Chilling.

And obligatory reading for anyone who wants to gain a deeper understanding on how "it" happened - which, in Germany at least, was not overnight.

One of the fascinating things about Victor Klemperer's life is how in the end he managed to survive the war.

In February 1945, luck had run out even for the so-called privileged Jews, and Klemperer had received a deportation order for February 16.

On February 13, the Dresden firebombing occurred.

In the chaos that followed, Klemperer removed his yellow star, claimed that he and his wife had quite understandably lost their papers, and fled the city.

As Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five said, "and so it goes."

I also thought of Klemperer's book in context of the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. The memorial - which contains thousands of stones that resemble large grave markers - starts out gradual. When we passed the other day, people were sitting on the outer stones (which are not that high) taking in the sun. Only as you walk deeper into the memorial does it start feeling scary, and by then the markers are bigger, and you're in over your head.

And so it goes.

(Here's a link to an NPR story that includes some pictures of the memorial.)