Otto Klemperer's Long Journey Through His Times

The great Otto Klemperer was born in 1885 in a city long buffeted by the forces of history. Called Breslau, in the Kingdom of Prussia, it had also been part of Bohemia, Hungary, Austria, and Germany—and is known to us today as Wrocław, Poland. Like the city of his birth, Klemperer was subject and witness to great political upheaval, from the abhorrent Nazism he fled in 1933 to the paranoid McCarthyism that forced him out of his adopted United States in the 1950s.