I Will Bear Witness is the first volume of a diary kept by a Jewish man, Victor Klemperer, during Hitler's rule of Germany, 1933 to 1941. Since Klemperer was married to a non-Jewish woman, he was not sent to the camps and remained in the city. Over the course of the diary's entries, the spread of the Nazi regime and the increasing restrictions on Jewish people in the country is tangible. Klemperer tries to remain true to his country but becomes disillusioned by the actions of the Nazis.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being is an existentialist novel by Milan Kundera centering around Tomas, a Czech intellectual living at the time of the Soviet invasion in 1968. Tomas is a womanizer, regarding sex and love as separate entities, and maintaing an extramarital affair with his friend Sabina. His wife, Tereza, fears, though begrudgingly tolerates, Tomas' infidelity. The book's central philosophical questions lie in the tension between lightness, associated with caprice, and heaviness, associated with commitment.