It is obscene, in a sense, to relate Klemperer's situation to any subsequent intellectual enquiry conducted unmolested by tyranny. But studies of language - whether social, political or aesthetic - owe him a debt. They implicitly gesture towards his act of witness, and towards others like it.
Times Higher Educational
This book is an honest narrative of hope and oppression, touching in places and well written, in an accessible translation.
M. Aaij
CHOICE
This book is a breathtaking balancing act, by turns horrifying and heroic, saddening and sardonic [...] of major historical importance and grippingly well-written
Philip Riley, Book Review for The International Journal of Applied Linguistics This important, stimulating and necessary book should be required reading for all who want to understand what politicians are doing to us today ... it is full of anecdotes and details that illustrate the effect of the changes in language ... This is a vital book.
Eric Hester, Catholic Times, April 2007 On the basis of his painstaking ethical-linguistic examinations, Klemperer is one of the most valuable witnesses to the methods of totalitarian mental corruption. The lasting message of this book is one of constant vigilance: wherever the machinery of atrocity is in motion, the misuse of language will be supporting it.
TImes Higher Educational, 17 June 10 Equal parts linguistic analysis and survivor’s memoir, Victor Klemperer’s The Language of The Third Reich (LTI) is noteworthy for its insight, intelligence, clarity, and even caustic humor … LTI is also a book that, given its author’s travails, is remarkably absent of bitterness. Though a victim, Klemperer does not write as a victim but rather as a once-captive though now-distant (even with the space of one year) observer to a language simultaneously terrifying and spellbinding. A Dresden Jew who had lived through the dark night of the Third Reich, Klemperer writes about his oppression with cool subjectivity. Yet in his cool subjectivity, Klemperer does not leave Nazism unscathed.
Rhetoric & Public Affairs