National Identity and Autobiographical Literature: The German Reception of Victor Klemperer's Notebooks

Central to this contribution is the analysis of the German reception of Victor Klemperer’s Third Reich journals I Will Bear Witness. My interest in this context will be threefold: first, I will deal with the Goldhagen-Klemperer discussion in Germany; secondly, the specific representation of Klemperer’s diaries in German historiography and German literary reviews will be discussed; thirdly, I will examine the reception of the diaries in the wider literary context of a significant number of recent German literary works, which seem to emphasize German wartime suffering and which appear to have a more distanced approach to Auschwitz as the identifying moment of postwar German identity; and finally, we will expound the importance of the complex relation between ‘memory’ and ‘identity’ to an adequate understanding of the reception of Klemperer’s notebooks in the literary culture of contemporary Germany.