I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the
Nazi Years; Volume I: 1933-41,
Volume II: 1942-45
by Victor Klemperer.
Modern Library, 2001,
$31.90 paper.
Little Nemo in Slumberland:
So Many Splendid Sundays
by Winsor McCay,
edited by Peter Maresca.
Sunday Press Books, 2005,
$120.00 cloth.
Invisible Cities
by Italo Calvino.
Harvest Books, 1978,
$13.00 paper.
Lying in bed one morning, on the blurry border of sleep, I realized that the three books I was currently reading all conjured up the fantastic realism of a dream. In each, incidents were depicted with hyper-lifelike clarity, but the story lines flagrantly, even preposterously, violated the rules by which we live, the very assumptions which govern our next step. Sequentiality itself was overthrown, or at least undermined. The narratives advanced, as if towards a crisis or climax, yet they seemed suspended in an aspic of frozen time. Or such was my dreamy epiphany. To a wide-awake mind, the books appeared at first to have almost nothing in common.
Little Nemo, a New York Herald Sunday comic strip of the early twentieth century, starred its eponymous little-boy hero each week in a dreamworld adventure (a selection was recently reissued in a full-sized facsimile edition edited by Peter Maresca). I Will Bear Witness is the abridged diary (even so, it fills up two fat volumes) of Victor Klemperer, a Jewish humanities professor who survived in Dresden under the Third Reich. Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, a landmark of postmodern literature, imagines Marco Polo regaling Kublai Khan with descriptions of the cities that he has seen in his travels.
The protagonists of these books are from different species: Little Nemo is an invention, Klemperer is an historical figure, and Calvino’s hybrid characters are fictionalized versions of historical personages. The authors’ aims are disparate: Winsor McCay wrapped his grand artistic ambitions within the family-entertainment package of Little Nemo; Klemperer, who was, among other things, an expert on eighteenth-century French memoirs, wrote his diary as a record for future historians; and the belle-lettrist Calvino, his aestheticism unadulterated by commercial or practical purpose, was experimenting with literary form for philosophical ends. Even the physicality of the books contrasts strikingly: the oversized illustrated sheets of Little Nemo; the densely packed, thousand-page record of the Klemperer diaries; and the slender Calvino volume, which seems to contain as much white space as text.
Very different. Still, when I was fully awake, I wondered what in particular is required to transmit the experience of a dream. It wasn’t a question of whether these books succeeded, because, except for McCay, the authors hadn’t even contemplated the task. I simply thought that by studying the three books, I might have a better sense of how the trick could be done.
Because it is, in all senses, the weightiest, as well as because it happened to be the book I started first, let’s begin with the Klemperer diaries. Victor Klemperer escaped extermination in a Nazi death camp by virtue of his long-standing marriage to an “Aryan” woman. Yet at all times his life dangled by a thread, vulnerable to unpredictable gusts—the vagaries of a Gestapo inspector’s mood, an unintentional concealment of the Jewish star on his coat, his walking in ignorance on the forbidden side of a street, or even the possible demise of his wife, Eva, which would have forfeited his privileged status. The fact that Eva’s sudden death would engender his own is a reminder that his perilous state was essentially a horrific magnification of the human condition, in which fatal disaster can always intrude unexpectedly. “No one knows exactly what is allowed, one feels threatened everywhere,” Klemperer wrote in July 1940. It is a familiar feeling, but one that we normally experience only in flashes. We shield ourselves from existential terror as best we can with laws, courts, contracts, and all the other buttresses of civilization that had been pulled away from the Jews. A nightmare is terrifying because it is constructed of the ubiquitous material from which we normally avert our eyes.
But Klemperer’s experience under the Third Reich was not only a nightmare. In a broader sense, it was like any dream, whether comforting or scary. Freudian “dream logic” governed life in Nazi Germany. “In the evening paper they have the nerve to maintain the opposite of what they maintained in the morning paper, and the people swallow both,” Klemperer wrote on New Year’s Day 1944. Later that year, he observed as a telling characteristic of the language of the Third Reich “a never-ending impudent abandonment of assertions that have been made the day before.” As in a dream state, contradictions were not just rapid-fire but simultaneous. One regulation required Jews when they took trams to stay on the front platform and not enter the carriage; then a new regulation came out requiring all tram users to board in the front and disembark from the rear. “Now, which command should a Jew obey when he alights?” Klemperer wondered. “Any transgression of a command costs him, by way of prison and camp, his life.”
In their defiance of logic and stability, the circumstances Klemperer described certainly seem dreamlike. More than that—and this is really what interests me—the way the facts are recounted mirrors the contradictory sequentiality and timelessness of a dream. By its nature, a diary marches forward. In practice, however, a diarist can usually check previous entries to modify them on the basis of what he now knows or to inform what he is about to record. Because a Gestapo discovery of his diary would have resulted in the loss of many lives, not least of them his own, Klemperer entrusted the pages to a Gentile friend. Every few days, Eva would take the new entries over; the diarist would not see them again until the war ended. As a result, there are inconsistencies and contradictions in the diary, just as in the society that surrounded him. Through the uniformity of its format, the dailiness of a journal can make the thread of time appear to stretch indefinitely, one hour after the next. Fortuitously, it was the perfect marriage between experience and medium. As early as 1940, Klemperer wrote that “we have no sense of time anymore, everything is an undifferentiated viscous endlessness.” As time went on, the sense of timelessness increased. “Only a few facts stick in the mind, dates not at all,” he wrote in September 1944. “One is overwhelmed by the present, time is not divided up, everything is infinitely long ago, everything is infinitely long in coming; there is no yesterday, no tomorrow, only an eternity…The sense of time has been abolished; one is at once too blunted and too overexcited, one is crammed full of the present.”
In a book that you turn page by page (and even more so in a time-governed medium like theater or film), one way to achieve an illusion of timelessness is through the use of repetition. Another technique is to cut the tie of act and consequence. Klemperer’s diary of his life in Dresden does both. As a writerly device, the method is strikingly akin to that of Calvino’s short chapters in Invisible Cities, which describe city after city in ways that make them seem both distinct and alike. (That is Calvino’s aim; Klemperer is only doing his best to transmit faithfully his experience.) Towards the end of Klemperer’s diaries, as he and Eva are wandering through Germany after the firebombing of Dresden, he recorded a passage that might be from Calvino. “We have since been in Aichach another three times and my impression is always the same,” he wrote. “I can distinguish it from Falkenau and Pfaffenhofen almost solely in terms of size—the large small town, the smaller small town, the very small small town. There is always a ring of almost villagelike houses and streets around an elongated patrician and historic main square.” As Calvino’s Polo tells Kublai, “Traveling, you realize the differences are lost; each city takes to resembling all cities…”
Calvino is better at evoking suspension than suspense. His tale moves forward, but languidly, as through a haze of opium smoke. The great advantage of the one-page comic strip, which McCay in Little Nemo exploited with a genius that has never been equaled, is formal: its panels constitute a sequence that the eye grasps in one swoop. It is difficult to imagine a better medium to convey the queer sense of time in a dream. With dizzying panache, McCay played with the possibilities. The chronological selection of his strips allows us to appreciate his growing mastery of the form. At his peak, from mid-1906 through mid-1908, he exploited the framework of individual panels so that the page reads as both a single composition (with symmetries and continuities between the panels) and a narrative sequence. The visual elegance and economy of Little Nemo come as close as anything I know to capturing the quality of a dream. In the end, though, the narrative material (which the new edition allows one to read easily for the first time since the strips were published) is juvenile and jejune. Klemperer’s real-life dreams are incomparably more compelling.
In his early strips, McCay began with Nemo in bed and ended with the boy waking, but soon realized that only the waking was necessary. It is the disenchantment that defines the dream. This is the simple answer to all the sagelike obfuscations of the distinction between dream and reality, a version of which appears in Invisible Cities: “It is our eyelids that separate them, but we cannot know which is inside and which outside.” Of course we can know. As McCay illustrated at the conclusion of each strip, we know when the alarm clock goes off or when we fall out of bed. Without the waking, there is no dream.
In I Will Bear Witness, the waking first comes with the providential horror of the Allied firebombing of Dresden. By throwing the city into chaos, the destruction removes for Klemperer the imminent threat of deportation and death. In a dream, this would be the assimilation of penetrating reality into the dreamworld as a defense against reveille (the onset of shrieking birds when the alarm clock sounds). For the Klemperers, the nightmare concludes a few months later when, with the war over, they return to their home in suburban Dresden. This is when they actually wake up, and, appropriately, it is where the editor chooses to end the wartime diaries.
The centrality of waking to the essence of the dream can hardly be overemphasized. At one point at the end of 1944, in the darkest hours before what would prove to be dawn, Klemperer ruminated over questions to which he could supply no answers. “And as a scholar that is my greatest fear of death: that in all probability it will give me no answer to all my questions,” he wrote. Life ends in darkness. Dreams end with enlightenment. A dream from which we never awake we can never identify as a dream.
Arthur Lubow, whose journalism appears in a variety of periodicals, is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of a book about Richard Harding Davis called The Reporter Who Would Be King.
