Victor Klemperer kept a secret diary throughout the Nazi period, recording with meticulous precision the daily experience of being a Jewish intellectual in a society that was systematically stripping him of every right and recognition. A professor of Romance languages at the Technical University of Dresden, a decorated veteran of the First World War, and a Protestant convert who considered himself thoroughly German, Klemperer watched as each of these identities was rendered meaningless by the racial laws that progressively confined, impoverished, and endangered him. This first volume covers the years from 1933 to 1941, and its power lies in its accumulation of detail: the colleague who stops greeting him, the shop where he is no longer served, the park bench he is forbidden to use, the radio that is confiscated, the pet cat that must be surrendered. Klemperer records not only the large persecutions but the thousand small humiliations that constituted daily life under the Third Reich, and his observations about the gradual normalization of tyranny remain among the most penetrating ever written. He pays close attention to language, noting how Nazi propaganda corrupted German vocabulary and how ordinary people absorbed its formulations without resistance. His survival—he was protected for years by his marriage to a non-Jewish wife, Eva—allowed him to continue writing when most witnesses had been silenced. The diary's immediacy distinguishes it from memoirs written after the fact: Klemperer did not know how the story would end, and his entries carry the uncertainty, fear, and occasional misplaced hope of someone living through history without the comfort of hindsight.