OAKLAND COUNTY'S PREMIER LIFESTYLE & FASHION MAGAZINE

hoping to put as much distance as
possible between them and anyone
who can recognize and denounce
them.
Here, Klemperer's entries undergo
a profound shift in character. They
become long, almost surreal narratives
of a harrowing journey through a
strange, strange land. His description
of the destruction of Dresden, of the
chaos and numbing terror, is strobo-
scopic.
The Klemperers make their way to
Munich and eventually witness the
collapse of the Third Reich. Suddenly,
everyone begins to reinvent the past:
"To what extent are coats now being
turned," he notes bitterly, "to what
extent can one trust? Now everyone
here was always an enemy of the
[Nazi] Party."
Klemperer has this wry assessment
of one of the occupying armies: "
the Americans make neither a vindic-
tive nor an arrogant impression. They
are not soldiers in the Prussian sense
at all ... they do not carry a bayonet,
only a short rifle or a long revolver
ready at hand; the steel helmet is
worn as comfortably as a hat, pushed
forward or back, as it suits them."
At this point, a certain odd coinci-
dence pleads for attention: Klemperer
was a cousin of the renounced con-
ductor Otto Klemperer. Otto's son,
Werner, became an actor, starring in
the impossibly silly '60s American sit-
corn Hogans Heroes, in which he
played the commandant of a POW
camp housing a gaggle of irrepressibly
sneaky Allied soldiers.
The closing shot, over which the
credits were flashed, showed one of
those old-fashioned German helmets
with a preposterous spike attached to
the top, onto which a well-broken-in
American Army officer's cap had been
hung at a jaunty angle.
And, serious as I Will Bear Witness
may be, it will be the exceptional
reader who does not flash to that shot
from Hogan's Heroes.
The tale is not over, though. By
train, milk truck and donkey cart, but
mostly on foot, Victor and Eva slowly
make their way through an anarchic
postwar Germany, back finally in
Dresden, in the newly established
Russian zone.
Their house in the suburbs —
which had been appropriated years
ago — was untouched in the bomb-
ing. Red tape? Why, no — no red
tape at all, a polite local official
assures them. Just walk right in.
And, in Victor's final entry, so
they do.

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*1998 Simmons
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