The curious fact need not be imputed to have any immediate practical applications. Nature provides us with random acts of gravitational violence in the form of galaxy collisions. Graceful spiral forms, tails and bridges are sculpted by these interactions. But we know how gravity works and galaxies are structured, so we can take the sculptors tool from Natures hand and play with it in a supercomputer removing the random element.
Klemperer found that special symmetric arrangements of particles could follow predictable orbits. These exact N-body solutions seem to have no natural counterpart and even Klemperer stated that he really just studied them for fun!
In the same spirit, I have put galaxies in similar unnatural symmetric configurations to explore their evolution. One amazing consequence of Newtons laws of motion is that any system with some symmetry built in should preserve that symmetry even if complex dynamical behaviour is occuring.
For the sequence of simulations here, it seems that symmetry is preserved even when spiral patterns emerge after the galaxies interact strongly.
In this he was entirely successful. His main theme is the uniqueness of the Nazi tyranny: "There is nothing spontaneous. All is methodical and orderly, organized 'cultivated' cruelty, and it happens hypocritically, mendaciously in the name of Kultur. Day in, day out, Klemperer comments on current affairs: on Hitler's speeches "his favorite foreign words are 'discrimination' and 'defamation' " and the elimination of all opposition, on the racial laws, on the war's progress.
There are vivid accounts of events he witnesses, conversations he overhears and many character studies of victims and victimizers, fanatics and opportunists of all sorts. All this, and the ever-narrowing horizons of his own private world, produces a nightmarish picture of life within a national society gone berserk; the inferno is an artful mosaic, made up of endless fragments of meanness and a few isolated acts of kindness.
Hitler's rise to power is described as the result of a chaotic mixture of nihilism and masochism, a rebellion against authority and at the same time a neurotic submission to it. It's shocking how all opposition has disappeared. No one dares any more to speak up. Klemperer's own private attempt to hold the beast at bay by recording its acts and by exposing its corrupted language continued to the end, an undertaking as crazy, as courageous and as endearing as that of the little barber in Chaplin's "Great Dictator.
Life in a concentration camp would have been worse, of course. Since he was not deported to Auschwitz or even confined in Dachau, Klemperer was, in a sense, a privileged Jew. Nevertheless, the daily account of how his own living space narrows and diminishes step by step is harrowing enough.
First, his students stop registering for his courses; then he loses his professorship. His colleagues begin not to recognize him in the street. Then, his telephone is disconnected; his driver's license is revoked; his food rations are cut to a minimum of cabbage and potatoes. His typewriter is taken away. Banned from the university library, he is forced to give up his scientific work. He is ordered to adopt a new first name: he must call himself Israel Victor Klemperer or face deportation to a concentration camp.
He and his wife have to vacate their little house in Dolzschen but continue to pay taxes on it and all repairs. For the remaining years of the war they are moved from one Judenhaus to another, where several "mixed" families crowd into a single apartment.
They must kill their cat, for Jews are not allowed to keep pets. Klemperer cannot buy flowers, books, tobacco, newspapers or shaving cream "Jews are supposed to grow beards".
He is pressed into forced labor; he shovels snow and works in a Dresden factory. He must walk to work nearly four miles each way since the use of all public transportation is forbidden to Jews.
In September , made for the first time to display the yellow Judenstern on his outer coat, he registers "a raving attack of despair. Of an otherwise robust constitution, he sleeps well at night. His nightmares start when he wakes up. He expects to be deported at any moment. He occasionally scavenges the garbage for food. A few elderly people, seeing the Judenstern on his coat, come up in the dark and silently shake his hand in sympathy. Others, mostly young, spit at him or scream foul epithets.
When a neighbor remarks that Klemperer, in his isolation, would hardly be able to cover in his diary the "main events" like the war, he writes: "The main events aren't as important for my record as is the every-day of the tyranny, which might be forgotten.
A thousand gnat bites are worse than a blow on the head. I observe, I note the gnat bites. Maintaining the diary and getting it out of the house periodically to a safe hiding place took on life-and-death importance. The diary was his "balancing rod without which I would crash into the abyss. It always helped. His wife's help was, of course, crucial too.
She took the risk of carrying his notes to the house of an old friend, where they were hidden in a suitcase. Eva Klemperer suffered from frequent nervous breakdowns, attacks of neuralgic pain and bouts of deep depression. She was a truly heroic woman who shared her husband's humiliations and saved him from the worst -- the death camps. The diary is a moving testimony to their love, the story of a close partnership that no hardship and terror could break.
All agreed that one reason for their appeal was, of course, their literary quality. The other reason was said to be political. Henryk M. Broder, a columnist for Der Spiegel magazine, says Klemperer's diaries are like litmus paper: they can be employed to test the reactions of people to some key notions that have recently come under much discussion in Germany: identity, nationalism, "German-ness," Heimat homeland , "pride of Fatherland" and patriotism.
Decried in the past, mainly by liberals, these are being increasingly hailed as "positive" values in the aftermath of German reunification. Before reunification, liberal Germans often maintained that Germany was no longer a nation-state.
Even some conservatives were ready to concede that nationalism had been the gravedigger of Europe, and of Germany, in two World Wars. Liberals upheld Verfassungspatriotism patriotism linked not to the German nation but to the liberal West German constitution adopted in with the blessings of the Anglo-American-French occupation powers. After reunification, more and more people said that Germany must adopt a new "national agenda. Germany was said to have become a nation-state again, entitled to throw its weight about.
Fifty years after the war, Germany had the right, once again, to be proud of itself -- not of Nazism, of course, but of its more distant past and of its present, its thriving economy, its free democratic institutions, its culture. For those who deplored the lack of national pride among Germans in the postwar period, the moving diaries of a terrorized, disenfranchised Jew who continued to be proud of his Deutschtum struck a welcome chord.
The film maker Hans-Jurgen Syberberg welcomed it as a document vindicating his yearnings for the irrational "creative power" of Heimat and Volk. Martin Walser, one of Germany's best-known novelists formerly a Communist sympathizer, now a neoconservative , found in Klemperer's life and Weltanschauung convenient means to propagate his own German Dream.
Klemperer had already appeared in one of his novels in Last year, Walser raised a fury of protests when he publicly argued that one reason for the spread of skinhead violence and right-wing xenophobia in Germany was a general neglect of Heimat and patriotism. After reading the diaries, Walser hailed Klemperer as the "ideal human figure in the German memory-conflict.
Klemperer was recently awarded posthumously the prestigious Geschwister Scholl Prize for Civic Courage. Sophie and Hans Scholl, two young students, were executed in for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets. Walser happened to be the main speaker at the award ceremony. This could not have been accidental. He devoted nearly his entire speech to the proposition that the memory of Auschwitz must not be allowed to destroy the possibility of renewed Jewish assimilation within German nationhood and culture.
Klemperer was his star witness. Even Klemperer's conversion to Protestantism "independent of all religious feeling had been an act of emancipation," Walser insisted. He is encouraged by the upward trend in Jewish immigration to Germany the number of Jews in Germany has more than doubled in recent years and by the moving example of Klemperer's attachment to Germany.
Walser went on to suggest that the project of Jewish assimilation ought to be taken up once again. The so-called German-Jewish symbiosis had not necessarily been a tragicomic self-delusion, as Gershom Scholem and many others had claimed.
Nor was it necessarily one-sided. The tragedy had not been inevitable. Walser's speech caused a stir. The philosopher Jurgen Habermas, visibly angry, walked out of the assembly hall. A few days later Habermas protested in the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper against Walser's attempt to whitewash the tragic dimension of the Jewish experience in Germany with a "mouthful of self-congratulations" and the evocation of an "obscenely harmonized German-Jewish culture.
I spent a day in Dresden recently, walking up the road to the village of Dolzschen, where Klemperer and his wife had built their little house in and to which they returned to live after the liberation. The house still has its "gable" in the regulation Germanic style. But the village, which was long ago incorporated into the nearby city, has lost the rural character that the Klemperers so loved.
Their rose garden and fruit trees have disappeared. Dresden was known before the war as the "Florence of the North. The view of Dresden today from the surrounding hills is almost as bleak as that of, say, Kaliningrad or of some other Communist city quickly rebuilt after the war -- drab, monotonous and shabby.
Some of the main thoroughfares that were cut through the old city after the war are wide enough to allow eight tanks abreast to pass a reviewing stand. There are plans to narrow them. Downtown, in the old city center, dark smog hung between the dilapidated houses, turning the sunlight a sickly brown-yellow.
Dresden is still only the torso of a city. Some of the better-known historical buildings that Klemperer loved were carefully restored, based on photographs and on Canaletto paintings. They are surrounded today by a ramshackle Marxist version of Dallas. Gaping voids remain. More than 50 years after the terrible air bombardment that killed , people -- and saved Klemperer's life -- many scars and wounds endure. As I turned the corner into the wide Pragerstrasse, I ran into or so men and women, mostly young, chanting slogans.
They were protesting the recent daubing, presumably by skinheads or neo-Nazis, of tombstones in an old Jewish cemetery. On their heavy overcoats and parkas many displayed yellow cardboard Judensterns, a gesture that attracted the attention of onlookers. The yellow stars gave the place a haunted, ghostly quality. March 10, Hitler elected as Chancellor.
What I had called terror was only a mild prelude. It is amazing how everything collapses. And with it, on streets and radio, unrestrained propaganda. On Saturday I heard a piece of Hitler's speech in Konsigsberg. I understood only a few words. But the tone! The unctuous roaring bark, the bark, really, of a clergyman. How long will I be able to retain my professorship?
March 17, It was frightful. The phraseology of unity.
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