"But how many human minds are capable of resisting the slow, fierce, incessant, imperceptible driving force of indoctrination?" - Primo Levi
Language has miraculously revelatory powers, but it can also render whole nations temporarily insane, spread social contagions, and incite to mass murder. It is these malign uses and effects of language that Viktor Klemperer discusses in his The Language of the Third Reich: A Philologist’s Notebook.
Klemperer was a German-Jewish philologist and professor of Romance languages, who kept a diary in Dresden between 1933 and 1941, and The Language of the Third Reich comprises his observations on the changing uses of language just before and during the Third Reich (Klemperer survived the war due to his gentile wife). It is part survivor's journal, part linguistics case study, full of anecdotes and satirical portraits of his contemporaries. Drawing on conversations, radio broadcasts, novels, official documents, songs, slogans and slang, it was intended to “observe and memorize what was going on” and show how, through language, “conscience, remorse and morality can be extinguished in whole swathes of people”.
As in 1930s and 40s Germany, we too are living through an era in which “the language of a clique has become the language of everyone”. This is the language that has perforated down from American campuses, the activist language of Critical Race Theory, trans-activism, and now a resurgent, virulent antisemitism that has inspired middle class graduates to again, as in the Reich, become primitive herd animals taking to the streets and shrieking ancient, atavistic blood libels.
As in 1930s and 40s Germany, we too are living through an era in which “the language of a clique has become the language of everyone”.
Now, as in Nazi Germany, a language of cranks and extremists, a language of fanaticism, has become the language of the everyday. As in 1939, on campuses and on demonstrations there are calls for the extermination of Jews, and we have seen the return of the very same words and symbols discussed by Klemperer almost 100 years earlier. “Zionist”, “Jewish” and “Jew” have again become interchangeable conspiratorial smear-words, in part because in most Arab and Muslim countries, these kinds of antisemitic tropes and smears never disappeared, never became disreputable.
The nub of The Language of the Third Reich, its use-value for us, lies in Klemperer’s identification of the following five manipulative uses of language that made Nazism and the Holocaust possible:
- hysterical, exaggerated and hyperbolic language
- euphemism
- deforming and reversal of meaning
- smearing and denunciation
- and above all, constant repetition—especially of lies, and old words given new meanings.
