Dominique Pagani discusses Victor Klemperer in 2021, first in a "Musicosophie" session devoted to "the two Klemperers" and Bruno Walter in Wagner. He presents him as a philologist specialising in French literature, from an illustrious Jewish family. He recalls that Klemperer escaped deportation, protected by his German wife and then saved by the bombing of Dresden, before living in the GDR1. He also notes that Klemperer's war diary was translated by a Berlin correspondent2. What he mainly draws from him concerns LTI, the Language of the Third Reich: in it Klemperer studies how Nazi propaganda forges a new way of speaking through lexical agglutination3. In May 2021, in a session on Heidegger, he relies on this work of decoding the regime's words. He thus points out that "historicity" was a key word of the LTI, while "metaphysics" becomes one with Heidegger4.
Summary produced automatically from 7 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.
Who is this?
Victor Klemperer (9 October 1881 – 11 February 1960) was a German philologist and diarist who chronicled life in the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, under Nazi Germany, and in East Germany. His detailed observations are among the most important firsthand accounts of everyday life under Nazism. Dismissed from his university post as part of the racial policy of Nazi Germany, he survived persecution in Dresden, where he continued his diaries in secret. After 1945, he joined the Socialist Unity Party of Germany and later served as a cultural figure. […]
9:11LTI: The Language of the Third ReichA specialist in the language of the Third Reich, a Jewish scholar who escaped deportation, he decodes the words of the regime.
17:31LTI: The Language of the Third ReichHe shows that "historicity" was a key word of the LTI; "metaphysics" becomes one with Heidegger.