Victor Klemperer's Diary: 16 August 1936

Yesterday afternoon – we had just returned very tired and hot from the flower show, I had peeled off and was making coffee – there appeared in cycling clothes, with sandals and shorts, grey with green turn-ups, a yodelling lad, Wengler, and stayed for hours. Everything spoke against him, but he is such a thoroughly decent fellow that one finds him likeable even at the most catastrophic moment. He had spent several weeks on holiday in Italy. He thinks Fascism or rather the Italian fascists more human than the Nazis. He relates as vouched for, that a few weeks before the beginning of the Spanish counter-revolution, General San Jurjo, who was later killed, had discussions in the Adlon Hotel in Berlin and that there are German officers with Franco’s Moroccan troops. He believes the victory or defeat of the Spanish Popular Front decisive for the whole of Europe and says quite seriously, thoughtfully, without any pathos, as with a weighed-down conscience: ‘One really should go there and help them; but I can’t even shoot.’ Later he complained how disagreeable it is for him to start teaching again on Tuesday.

That is Wengler. Johannes Kühn, however, whom I always took to be a man of integrity and a genuine thinker, professor of history Johannes Kühn has written a short article in the Dresdener NN (16th August) on the 150th anniversary of the death of Frederick the Great. In a hundred lines he twice calls him emphatically ‘a Nordic-Germanic man’. His philosophy is out of date and unimportant; behind it stands the Germanic belief in things higher and beyond this world; his inclination toward French culture is the Northern German’s typical longing for form and the South. – If one day the situation were reversed and the fate of the vanquished lay in my hands, then I would let all the ordinary folk go, and even some of the leaders, who might perhaps after all have had honourable intentions and not known what they were doing. But I would have all the intellectuals strung up, and the professors three feet higher than the rest; they would be left hanging from the lamp posts for as long as was compatible with hygiene. - Victor Klemperer's Diary, 16th August, 1936