When Klemperer's diaries became public in the 1990s, editors mostly excluded the material about film to keep the publication a manageable size. This new edition restores entries from between June 1929 and April 1945 with a focus on what Klemperer describes as one of his “addictions”—watching movies. Film scholars will be happy to have Klemperer's glosses on films both famous and forgotten. Almost everyone knows The Blue Angel, but not The Three from the Filling Station (1930), which outgrossed it at the box office. Klemperer despises the first talkies in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Awful (scheusslich) is his word for them—as jarring, he says, as a voice coming from a burning bush. He finds them disturbingly artificial and argues that film must become an expressive art, like ballet, and be carried by music, or else it will become an obnoxious dead mechanism (and disgusting as...
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