The Language of the Nazi Genocide: Linguistic Violence and the Struggle of Germans of Jewish Ancestry (review)

Since Victor Klemperer published his famous 1947 work on the language of the Third Reich, LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii, many scholars, mostly philologists and literary critics, have inquired into the vocabulary of the Nazis. Whereas these studies have tended to favor a static picture of the manipulative power of the Nazi language, Thomas Pegelow Kaplan aims to historicize the topic and embed it in the political and social history of the murder of the Jews. Relying on a revised Foucauldian notion of discourse analysis that focuses on how historical actors’ negotiations of what can be said shapes “truth,” Pegelow Kaplan explores how various actors defined Germanness and Jewishness by engaging in linguistic inclusions and exclusions.

Because he is interested in continuities and discontinuities beyond the major political caesuras, Pegelow Kaplan begins his period of research in April 1928, a time of political stability and inclusionary tendencies. He analyzes five crucial moments in the Nazi politics of exclusion, ending after the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in October 1946. In order to avoid a top-down perspective, he identifies three discursive levels: the official guidelines issued by the state agencies (such as Goebbels’s ministry and the Reichssippenamt or RSA) that defined the language of belonging and gave meaning to legal provisions such as the Nuremberg Laws; mass media, in particular newspapers that disseminated, confirmed, or contested this language; and personal accounts such as diaries, which cover the subjective dimension of the daily struggle for belonging. Taking up Saul Friedländer’s call for an integrative as well as integrated history of Nazism and the Holocaust, Pegelow Kaplan examines the language of both the perpetrators and the Jewish victims, and explores their dynamic though unequal interaction. Among the newspapers he evaluates are the official Nazi paper, the Völkischer Beobachter; the liberal German Frankfurter Zeitung, which managed to display some defiance during the Nazi period; the Zionist Jüdische Rundschau; and the “assimilationist” Jewish C.V. [Centralverein]-Zeitung (the latter two terminated in 1938).

Given his multilayered research agenda, Pegelow Kaplan insists on the one hand on the enormous linguistic variety throughout the Nazi period. At no time did the perpetrators and the victims agree on what was German and what was Jewish. On the other hand, Pegelow Kaplan’s qualitative and quantitative (lexicometric) analysis of the five newspapers leaves no doubt that the categories of belonging were continuously confined and narrowed. In 1928, the Frankfurter Zeitung still advocated an inclusive understanding of the (later Nazified) category Volksgemeinschaft, or people’s community—a type of Germanness that in principle included Jews as well. At the same time, the leading democratic paper in Germany, which benefited from contributions by numerous outstanding Jewish journalists, also presented Jews as distinct from what it considered German and “reiterated the divide between Germans and Jews by depicting the two subjects with different appearances and manners of speaking” (p. 31). This discursive strategy anticipated trends developing after 1933, as the paper continued to provide its readers with concepts of Germanness and Jewishness that evinced “increasing ethno-racial connotations” (p. 132). Nonetheless, throughout its existence under the Third Reich, the Frankfurter Zeitung offered alternatives to the blatantly racist constructions of the Nazi bureaucracy and propaganda machine. It did so in part by displaying sympathy—even in fall 1941, after the introduction of the yellow star badge for Jews in Germany—for the Mischlinge and portraying them as ready to join the army and fight Bolshevism.

The book pays particular attention to the two major Jewish papers in Germany, which continued to appear through late 1938. Although he notes the obvious differences between the Zionist and the more assimilationist paper and the many acts of “discursive contestation” in which they engaged in the early years of the regime, Pegelow Kaplan’s point here is that in the end neither challenged the binary concept of...