Klemens von Klemperer's distinguished career as a historian of German conservatism and the elite strata of wartime resistance to Hitler is well known to the readers of this journal. In Voyage through the Twentieth Century, he contributes to another historical-literary tradition—memoirs of those who belong to what Walter Laqueur has identified as “generation Exodus,” the cohort of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany born between 1914 and 1928. In addition to Laqueur himself, Hanus Burger, Stefan Heym, Wolfgang Leonhard, Alfred Grosser, George Mosse, Fritz Stern, Gunther Stent, Henry Kissinger, Werner Angress, Gerda Lerner, Peter Gay, Eric Hobsbawm, Felix Gilbert, Raul Hilberg, and Victor Brombert have all written memoirs of varying degrees of introspection and reflection on their German/Austrian, American, and Jewish identities.

As Laqueur noted in his eponymously titled book, the members of “generation Exodus” were born into assimilated middle-class families. Their identification with Jewish traditions varied, though most kept their distance from Orthodoxy and Zionism (at least until 1933) and shared their parents' disdain for the impoverished urban populations of “Ostjuden.” Most recall their years in pre-1933 Germany and Austria as happy and stable, a judgment colored though not distorted by Nazi persecution. A significant number managed to escape Germany (indeed, as Marion Kaplan pointed out, younger German Jews often urged their hesitant parents to leave the country). Many of the men of this cohort—including von Klemperer and most of the authors mentioned above—served in the Allied armies in World War II and in the occupation, an experience that shaped their loyalties and still-unformed identities in significant ways. Not least, their services as interrogators, psychological warfare operatives, counterintelligence agents, and cultural affairs officers made a substantial contribution to allied victory and to the occupation's success.

Klemens von Klemperer was born in Berlin in 1916. He maintained close connections with the Austrian side of his family, recalling admiringly his uncle Hugo von Hofmannstahl's claim that Prussian and Austrian “character traits” complemented each other. He was baptized a Lutheran and recalls learning of his Jewish background when he was ten. Von Klemperer's memoir is not among those that contain extended reflections on Jewish identity. Unlike other members of his cohort, he did not forge a close connection to Jewish traditions or Judaism after 1933. And unlike other refugee soldiers in allied uniform, he did not take it upon himself to restore decimated Jewish communities, let alone remind self-pitying Germans of their absent former neighbors. He does not recall wrestling with vengeful urges during or after the war. The indignity of a former Wehrmacht general's accusation of treason to his face at a dinner party in the 1970s seems not to have bothered him much. Comments on the Holocaust found on the last two pages of the book struck this reader as rather tacked on.

If shuttling between Berlin and Vienna suited him on a superficial level, what strikes him in retrospect about his youth is the “rootlessness” of his identity, a condition greatly intensified once he was “disinherited” from his birthright as a German. This “disinherited” state inspired what became a lifelong attempt to identify with “another Germany,” a Germany true to his conservative values and personified by the principled, courageous, and tragic conservative men who became the objects of his scholarship. The memoir's most insightful passages are those that connect his personal and intellectual odysseys. As for other Germans who resisted, von Klemperer has little to say. As Jill Stephenson remarked about much of the official memory of the anti-Nazi resistance in West Germany, it is as if only a handful of aristocratic officers comprised what may be properly understood as “the resistance.” Von Klemperer's tepid acknowledgment that quite a few German communists also resisted the regime is less than generous. There were multiple courageous and humane “other Germanies,” and not just the one of his elitist fantasies.

Von Klemperer left Vienna in 1938 for the United States and attended Harvard University (where he resumed his studies after the war). Like other members of his cohort, he knew little about his new home. He does not admit to having read Karl May's novels as a boy, though he lets slip that he “fantasized about Indians” and “strong, wild free Americans.” He joined the army in 1943, following the example of his two older brothers. Von Klemperer recounts his days as a recruit with both admiration for certain aspects of the America military and bemusement at others, a characteristic of the best memoirs of refugees who became GIs. Like other refugees, he strove to fit in. He recalls his brother's advice to avoid lending money to those he didn't know well enough to trust and to learn how to be “a real ‘he man’” while being willing to “laugh with the drunks or cry with them if they feel like it.” Similarly, his friend Hans Epstein counseled him to “get tough” and swear profusely. And like most other refugees, he does not recall debilitating anti-Semitism or hostility directed toward him as a native-born German GI. His account echoes comments made by Henry Kissinger, Werner Angress, and others that the encounter with Americans from different backgrounds constituted a unique “education” and Americanized him.

Von Klemperer was trained as a military intelligence specialist and spent the remainder of the war analyzing captured German documents. As a soldier, his attitude toward Germany and the Germans was admirably moderate. Despite his personal history and the destruction he witnessed firsthand, he clung to the belief that “‘the other Germany’ of decency and urbanity” had survived twelve years of barbaric racial nationalism, while revelations of the regime's crimes only intensified his desire to learn about “the righteous ones.” The contradictions and shortcomings of American occupation policies did not cause him to despair for Germany's future or provoke bitter disillusionment, as was the case with Stefan Heym. He reveals no reservations about returning to Germany as a scholar. Indeed, successor generations of American and German scholars owe von Klemperer—along with Walter Laqueur, Guy Stern, Werner Angress, and others—a great debt of gratitude for building upon the transatlantic intellectual bridges they themselves began constructing as young refugees in the 1930s and as American citizen-soldiers.