Eva & Victor-Klemperer-Fellowship
With the title "Eva & Victor Klemperer Fellowship", the Collaborative Research Centre would like to honour a couple who have made a great contribution to the investigation of invectiveness as well as to the resistance against racist invectives. The Romanist Victor Klemperer (1881-1960) was appointed professor at Technische Hochschule Dresden in 1920. Due to his Jewish background, he was relegated by the TH in 1935 and in the following years, together with his wife, the pianist Eva Klemperer née Schlemmer (1882-1951), was subjected to increasingly severe repression. Like so many so-called "Aryan" wives of a German Jewish faith, Eva Klemperer was exposed to massive pressure to divorce him, which she steadfastly refused to accept. The Klemperer couple barely escaped deportation in 1945 due to the bombing of Dresden. Based on his diaries during the Third Reich, Victor Klemperer published his famous work LTI (Lingua Tertii Imperii) in 1947, in which he analysed in detail the violence and exclusionary effects of National Socialist language use. The book was dedicated to his wife, who had not only saved him from deportation, but who had also taken his manuscript to safety at the risk of her own life.