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> From: Peter Hidas <thidas@sympatico.ca> > > I could not agree with you more. Klemperer's love of anything German > (except, of course, Nazism) lead after the war to his full > collaboration with the East German communist regime. It was not his "love of anything German" but his experience of the catastrophe he had just survived, his hope the communist Germany would be the one realizing his ideals of humanism and enlightenment and his ardent wish to participate in "pumping out Germany's cesspit" (in a letter from June 20, 1946) as well as his longing to find the long withheld recognition. That this hope turned out to be a fatal error and his inability to draw the necessary consequences were Klemperer's personal tragedy. He was well aware of this discrepancy: many times he used the metaphor of "falling between all stools" (i.e. the title of his diaries of the years 1945-1959: "So sitze ich denn zwischen allen Stühlen", publ. in 1999). Monika Muggli
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