Readers of a certain generation may remember the actor Werner Klemperer, best known for playing Colonel Klink in the classic sitcom Hogan's Heroes. As it happened Klemperer (as is so often the case with those who have much opportunity for an artistic career) came from a prominent family, in this case not one of businessmen or politicians but artists and intellectuals. Werner's father was the conductor of the storied Kroll Opera House in Berlin until it was closed down in the Depression--after which persecution by the Nazis drove him out of the country, ultimately as far as Los Angeles, where he became the head conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and his son Werner found his way to the Pasadena Playhouse and Hollywood. However, the Klemperers still had relatives back in the old country, among them Professor of Romance languages at Dresden Technical University Victor Klemperer.
If in a very different way from Werner Victor is a noteworthy figure in his own right far outside even his specialty of French literature because of the diaries he kept in Germany during the war, and because of what grew out of it, his study of how the German language evolved--or, as I would think he would have had it, devolved--under Nazi rule, The Language of the Third Reich, which has an historical interest for those at all interested in Nazi Germany. Yet Klemperer today seems little known, in the United States at least. Why is that?
One can very easily chalk it up to the relative insulation of the United States from foreign authors and their works--as well as those relatively few authors and works that are "granted admission." A Max Weber or Sigmund Freud, a Karl Popper or Hannah Arendt, a Ludwig von Mises or Friedrich von Hayek, a Jacques Derrida or a Michel Foucault, were all highly serviceable to the needs of political orthodoxy in their ways, and above all Anti-Communism and the Cold War (the more easily given how many of them were ardent Cold Warriors). By contrast Klemperer was a citizen of a Communist country, and not some persecuted dissident of the kind America thought-leaders hasten to lionize but one in good standing with his government, who analyzed the Third Reich in ways that hit all too close to home not just for Nazis but for the right broadly, such that his person and ideas were doubly unwelcome.
As if all this were not enough Klemperer's attitudes toward the matter of ethnicity worked against his enjoying their favor. Klemperer was a universalist, who believed in a common humanity, and the individualism that only a common humanity allows. The more in as Klemperer was personally made to suffer so much at the hands of the believers in Race, he despised the "partial, bigoted . . . perverted form of romanticism" so dear to nationalists of so many kinds--all as, perhaps not unfittingly for a philologist, he thought that where culture was concerned "Language is more than blood." Indeed, if born a rabbi's son he was baptized as a Protestant decades before Hitler, and married to a gentile--a believer in assimilation who assimilated, and considered himself a German because he was a German, so much so that even as relatives like his cousins left he could not bear to leave his homeland, and went on regarding himself as a German through the Third Reich, and its Holocaust, and afterward, when he decided to return to the university he had taught at before, not just in Germany but the same German city where he had so long made his home.
Alas, in America, as Susan Glenn has shown, universalists like Klemperer ended up on the losing side of a "cultural Cold War" with the partisans of roots, heritage, the faith of one's fathers, difference, apartness from the Other, who held the idea of assimilation in contempt. Held that it is arrogant and foolish presumption to ever imagine that one could, or even should, define themselves rather than accept the definition imposed on them by birth, family, community, society, and even--perhaps most of all--those who would oppress them as, simultaneously despairing, bitter, prideful they insisted "They won't accept us, ever, and even if they would accept us to join them would be a sacrifice of our souls, a betrayal of ourselves"--because of that belief in roots, heritage, the faith of one's fathers, difference, apartness, thinking that this is "Who we are" and that without it we are nothing. And, having not the slightest sympathy, empathy, respect or even understanding of why anyone should think otherwise (the suffocation of the ethnic ghetto and chafing at the marginalization that goes with being outside the mainstream, a desire for a wider and freer life, the attractions of reason and universality and humanity, all nothing to them), they insist that anyone who thinks differently from the partisans of roots, heritage, the faith of one's fathers et. al. is less than human, or more often, simply a pathetic, deluded, likely self-hating creature who, unless he is saved by a return to the fold will see their life end in tragedy one way or another.
Of course, the universalists lost and the partisans of roots won that culture war no later than the 1970s, giving America its present-day politics of identity, multiculturalism and the rest demanding that people define themselves not merely by the ethnic community they were born into but by ancestors of whose lifeways they know little and which have lost all relevance to the world as "Who they are," define themselves as those who would persecute and oppress them define them rather than resisting, and indeed that those who have strayed from the tribe even think of their persecutor and oppressor as actually having given them a gift for which they ought to be grateful by forcing them to "rediscover their roots" and "embrace their heritage" and return to the faith of their fathers, difference, apartness from the Other, the fold, in that hackneyed drama so--to use a word Klemperer would approve--kitschily reenacted so many times in our era's memoir and fiction, with all that means for Klemperer's self-identification, and his larger understanding of these matters. (Indeed, in reviewing Klemperer's diary for the New York Times Richard Bernstein is every bit as graceless toward Klemperer on this score as one would expect a scribbler for that rag to be.) The irony in the unhappy situation is that this cult of roots that has contributed to the marginalization of Klemperer's work and insights is yet another reason why they are so thought-provoking--and I dare say, such a broad, humane, perspective a badly needed corrective in a world where so many have gone mad (or simply stupid) with their idolatry of the dark gods of Identity.
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