Willy Cohn (1888–1941)

Willy Cohn's diaries beg comparison with Victor Klemperer's. Certainly the two men had a lot in common: both married, middle-aged German-Jewish intellectuals, fiercely patriotic in spite of what their country was doing to them, and just trying to hang on and survive the Nazi era as best they could. Klemperer survived; Cohn did not.

The diary was certainly worth reading as a historical document, but I didn't like it as much as Klemperer's diaries and I didn't like its author as much. Cohn was a conservative Jew with opinions that were disconcertingly similar to Hitler's: Jews could never assimilate into the population and should not try, Germany needed "living space" even if they had to invade other countries to get it, etc. He certainly wouldn't have approved of Klemperer with his "mixed marriage" and his (albeit nominal) conversion to Christianity.

The parts of the book I liked the most were when Cohn wrote about his five children. He was an affectionate and devoted parent and his fatherly love shines through in his entries. He was able to get the oldest three children out in time; all of them wound up in Israel. The youngest two shared his fate.

As the years passed and Germany grew ever darker, Cohn spoke of emigrating, but he really didn't want to leave, and couldn't make up his mind. He was all like, "I want to go to Israel but the wife wants to go to America. To which countries can I get my pension transferred to? I'm fifty already; isn't it too late to start again in a whole other country?" Sometimes I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and scream in his face to wake him up. Towards the end I think he did start to realize the seriousness of the situation; he wrote that he didn't care what happened to him, that he'd lived his life, and he was only concerned about getting his wife and two young daughters to safety. But by then it was too late.

If you have a special interest in Holocaust diaries, or daily life for German Jews during the Nazi era, I would recommend this. It's definitely not for the casual reader though.… (altro)