Diary writing as a technology of the self

Subtitle:On the cultural performativity of graphic self-reflexion in Victor Klemperers Third Reich diaries

From a functional standpoint, diary writing can be seen as a complex strategy of self-construction. It is, however, not only strategy as an expression of personal intentionality, but also a cultural technique for the production of identity. This understanding of the diary takes up Michel Foucault’s notion of the “technology of the self”. In an article under this title, originally published in 1984, which treats his last project on the archaeology of subjectivity, Foucault sketches the development of self-techniques in Greco-Roman and early Christian culture. According to Foucault the history of the knowledge of man for its own sake must be examined in the context of four coordinates: technologies of production, technologies of sign systems, technologies of power and technologies of the self. The Foucauldian analysis aims to discover the relationships between the various practices of “concern for oneself” and self-knowledge, which result in the production of differing forms of subjectivity. The connection between concern for oneself and the activity of writing, whose early realization Foucault sees already in the form of hypomnēmata in the Hellenistic Age, becomes in the course of time one of the basic techniques of self-knowledge and subjectification. Diaries, which in this sense can be fitted in an almost exemplary fashion into a history of subjectivity, as Foucault proposes in the third volume of Histoire de la sexualité (1984), seem to be a particularly suitable means of reconstructing the genesis and manner of functioning of concern for oneself and self-techniques – of self-observation, self-presentation and self-control. In this paper, the idea of the performative act of writing – of writing oneself – in diaries passes beyond the textual framework, by focusing, on the one hand, on the writing itself but also, on the other hand, on the effects of writing which constitute the subject. Taking the above presented concepts and ideas as its theoretical framework, this article will focus as a case study on Victor Klemperer’s changing German-Jewish identity in his Third Reich diaries entitled I Will Bear Witness. His journals provide an immediate insider’s view of inner emigration from the perspective of a victim of active persecution. I will attempt to examine how the author’s German nationalism gradually makes way, caught between contradictory impulses of assimilation and decreed Jewish identity, for a much more complex understanding of his own cultural identity. The autobiographical reliance on the speaking ‘I’ (and the presumed identity between the speaker and actor) reveals its involvement with subjectivity and self-construction through the performative act of writing. These diaries highlight a number of tensions that ultimately reflect on the disjunction between living and writing: The divide between a single and changing self lies at the heart of Victor Klemperer’s Third Reich diaries.

Keywords:Victor Klemperer, Diary, Third Reich, Autobiography