A labourer, journalist and a professor who lived through four successive periods of German political history ¿ from the German Empire, through the Weimar Republic and the Nazi state through to the German Democratic Republic ¿ Victor Klemperer is regarded as one of the most vivid witnesses to a tumultuous century of European history. First published in 1957, <i>The Language of the Third Reich</i> arose from Klemperer''s conviction that the language of the Third Reich helped to create its culture. As Klemperer writes: ''It isn''t only Nazi actions that have to vanish, but also the Nazi cast of mind, the typical Nazi way of thinking, and its breeding ground: the language of Nazism.''