‘I want to bear witness, precisely to bear witness,’ Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary on 27 May 1942. This private diary, which Klemperer, professor of linguistics at the University of Dresden, kept from 1933 to 1945 at the risk of his life, is one of the most striking texts on the fate of German Jews under the Nazi regime. Every object and every measure is filmed as plainly as possible, without emphasis or sentiment, to show how the most innocent thing ends up being taken up and enlisted by the Nazi regime in its project of destruction. Beyond the filmed archives of the period, the true characters of the film are these objects, these decrees, these words. Klemperer is nothing more in the film than an off-screen voice, content to state the facts with all the precision of his writing and his extraordinary eye for paradox.
