Victor Klemperer

It just lumps it into a vague feeling of wrongdoing.

The research we have today draws a direct line from this to the work of Victor Klemperer.

Right.

He studied language in Nazi Germany.

That should give you some idea of what a strange affair the Bavarian Revolution was.

Victor Klemperer, a journalist and scholar in Munich who became famous for the diaries he kept during this period and then later on during the Hitler years.

He wrote an article in January 1919, just as this is getting underway, in which he was trying to explain to curious outsiders who only knew Bavaria in broad strokes how such a strange situation had come to pass.

He wrote, quote, The Munich Puzzle The Bavarian is so proud of his heritage, so averse to all things foreign and particularly all things Nordic Yet who rules now, each in his own circle, but Messieurs Eisner, Moussam, and Levian? Eric Moussam was the leader of the anarchist faction, and like Eisner, he was a Jew from Berlin.

end quote.

Eisner was neither a skilled politician nor an inspiring orator, and people who saw him in person almost inevitably came away, invariably rather, came away unimpressed.

When Victor Klemperer, who was a liberal person politically, and as someone with Jewish ancestry himself, had no beef at all with Eisner's Jewishness, when Klemperer first saw Eisner in person, speaking at a rally, He was dumbfounded that this man had somehow been thrust into this role.

In his diary, he wrote, "...a delicate, tiny, frail, stooped little man.

Um, so there was the naivety of the old right vis-à-vis the new right, um, which we're seeing now.

Um, there is the insight we get from Victor Klemperer, um, the, the German Jewish philologist who survived largely thanks to his non-Jewish wife in Nazi Germany, um, kept a meticulous diary and published a book, um, on the language of the Third Reich.

If you haven't read it, I recommend it to everyone.

I started going back and teaching it again after Trump won in 2016, you know.