Victor Klemperer was a German intellectual who, after narrowly surviving the Holocaust, used his training as a literary scholar to analyze the rhetorical strategies of Hitler’s Nazi Germany. In his ninth and tenth chapters, Snyder repeatedly cites Klemperer’s 1947 book The Language of the Third Reich to show how Donald Trump uses these same strategies (like “endless repetition” and “the open embrace of contradiction”) to win support and how the “post-truth” era of American media and political discourse creates space for fascism to emerge.
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Victor Klemperer Character Timeline in On Tyranny
The timeline below shows where the character Victor Klemperer appears in On Tyranny. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 9: Be kind to our language.
People must find their own voices, separate from the majority’s, especially through books. Scholar Victor Klemperer noted that Hitler dismissed his opposition by carefully using words like “the people,” “struggles,” and...
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Chapter 10: Believe in truth.
...showmanship. While people might enjoy believing everything the government says, this destroys democracy. According to Klemperer, there are four ways that “truth dies.” First, tyrants ignore the truth and lie profusely—Snyder...
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...only person capable of solving various problems, so people simply have to believe in him. Klemperer wrote that Nazis felt the same way about Hitler: they supported him because of faith,...
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Chapter 11: Investigate.
...financially support journalism if they can. The people Snyder cites throughout his book—like Kołakowski, Arendt, Klemperer, and Havel—all had it much harder than writers today: they struggled to publish their writings,...
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