"How was it possible for educated people to betray their entire education, culture and humanity to such an extent?" (p.250).  In LTI (1946), culling observations from his equally remarkable diaries for 1933-1945, entitled I Will Bear Witness, Victor Klemperer (1881-1960) brought his scholarly and philological acuity to bear on ‘the Nazi question.’  His answer extends from the Enlightenment and Romanticism to everyday conversation, from birth announcements to punctuation, children’s books to concentration camps and implicates word and image, reason and affect, arts and sciences. Inasmuch as LTI elaborates on Schiller’s theme of “language which writes and thinks for you!” (p.234) by commenting on significant political, cultural, and academic material (texts, images, and films), the course will shift back and forth between close-reading of the text and our own analysis of some of this material, in striving to explain the demise of Weimar democracy and rapid consolidation of Nazi ‘totalitarianism’.