In November 1918, Munich—like the rest of Germany—was swept up in revolution as World War I ended and the Kaiser fled into exile.
The revolution soon devolved into civil war, and in Munich, the conflict paved the road to the rise of an unknown soldier returning from the front, Adolf Hitler.
Another soldier home from war, Victor Klemperer, resumed his academic career in the midst of armed struggle between left and right. His diaries have become a valuable eyewitness account of Nazi Germany.
Munich 1919, the first publication of his recollections of 1918-1919, provides a wealth of detail and sharp-eyed observations on a short phase of time little understood but formative for the terrible history to come.
Sympathetic neither to the far left nor right, Klemperer was a moderate unswayed by emotions on either side.
