Jazz and Germany
Clifford's story begins in Germany where he lives in a tight-knit and colorful community of artists, musicians, and homosexuals who are not accepted widely by their own culture. This story puts the well-known historical facts of Nazi Germany and World War II and places them within the context of Clifford's point of view. As a nuanced and expressive person, his diary is a harrowing account of painful and humiliating mistreatment at the hands of hypocritical and hateful people. The imagery starts with joy and music and ends with cages, famine, abuse, and the constant, looming threat of death.
The concentration camp
The imagery of the concentration camp is defined by lack of knowledge. Pepperidge does not know anything about Dashau, and no one knows that the Holocaust is about to unfold, so the imagery is largely revealed chronically through painful and hope-destroying revelations of chaos and death. When people start being executed en masse, the imagery is in full bloom. This is the imagery also of martyrdom, because the lack of knowledge leads to an experience of true knowledge that is so full of suffering and trauma that by the end of WWII, the entire psyche of Europe is shattered.
Diary and the imagery of experience
The diary constitutes its own form of imagery in this narrative because the diary is a concrete representation of what it represents abstractly, which is the real experience of the character, Clifford Pepperidge. That is to say that Clifford manufactured a semi-permanent reference to his own point of view. This imagery is even more important because it is considered from the other point of view too. The story also follows the fictitious publication of this fictional diary so that the imagery is shown internally and externally.
Power and hierarchy
The concentration camps have a pecking order, and the constant threat of starvation makes everyone more competitive. Basically, the chaos of the camps makes all the prisoners revert to survival psychology. That is part of the concentration camp's irony—constant panic and unimaginable emotional fatigue. Clifford also sees the hierarchy imagery of the Nazi organization. He realizes that the top dogs are basically the cruelest people with the least respect for human nature.
