From the foreword:
"As long as twenty years ago, my dear Eva, I prefaced the dedication of a collection of essays with the remark that a dedication from me to you in the conventional sense of a present was out of the question, given that you were already co-owner of my books, since they were in every way the product of an intellectual community of property. This is the same today.
But in this case things are rather different than with all my previous publications, this time I am even less entitled to present you with a dedication, and incomparably more compelled to do so than during those peaceful days in which we engaged in philology. But for you this book would not exist today, and its author too. If I were to explain this in detail it would require copious, intimate pages. ... You know, and even a blind man would be able to divine with his stick, to whom I am referring when I speak to my audience of heroism."
From the introduction:
"... a heroism which was completely deprived of support of being part of an army or a political group, of the hope of future glory, a heroism which was left to fend entirely for itself. These were the handful of Aryan wives (there were not that many of them), who resisted every pressure to separate from their Jewish husbands. And just imagine what everyday life was like for these women! ... What stoicism, what a huge outlay of self-discipline was needed to give fresh heart over and over again to their exhausted, broken, and desperate husbands. Amidst the grenade fire of the battlefield, surrounded by falling rubble in a collapsing bomb shelter, even confronted with the gallows, there is always a degree of pathos which affords some support - but in the debilitating nausea of everyday squalor, to be followed by an unforeseeable number of equally squalid days, what is there to keep you going? And to remain strong in this situation, strong enough to be able to embolden your partner the whole time, and convince him again and again that the hour would eventually come and that it is a matter of duty to wait for it, to remain this strong when one is left to cope entirely on one's own in lonely isolation, because the Jew's House does not constitute a community, despite the shared enemy and fate, and despite its common language - this is heroism {Heroismus} over and above any hero-worship {Heldentum}."
For those who found Umberto Eco's essay (in the NYRB) on the characteristics of fascism thought-provoking, Victor Klemperer's book, known succinctly as the LTI, is definitely worth reading with attention. Our modern age may often seem too cynical to be misled by hero-worship, or to be beguiled by the false promises of fascism. But after September 11th, we often easily acquiesce in calling certain people 'heroes' (I'm thinking of soldiers and firefighters as examples) without too much thought. The American armed forces are also hugely influential in the media, both in reportage and in fictional portrayal, projecting an image of aggressive, technologized masculinity - modern warriors in space-age body-armor that still manages to invoke a gladiatorial pose, bearing guns enhanced with lasers and scopes, gazing out inscrutably from behind glazed dark glasses. Military talk - "kinetic operations", "surge", "counterinsurgency" - has entered our civilian ken and work their way into our commonplace speech. Read Klemperer and learn why we should be worried about all this.
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