The diary of Victor Klemperer, who had repeated tragic experiences in the 1930s as a German Jew, provides a valuable record of that epoch. In the diary he frequently asks why “extreme nationalism” has become so rampant in Germany and some other countries at a time when “modern technology annuls all frontiers and distances.” Klemperer remained basically optimistic, and he wrote in late 1938 that nationalism was “already a thing of the past” and that its appearance in such extreme forms was perhaps its “last convulsive uprising”.