In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Language of the Third Reich: LTI, Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook by Victor Klemperer
  • Jerry Blitefield
The Language of the Third Reich: LTI, Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook. By Victor Klemperer. Translated by Martin Brady. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013; pp. 320. $19.95 paper.

Equal parts linguistic analysis and survivor’s memoir, Victor Klemperer’s The Language of The Third Reich (LTI) is noteworthy for its insight, intelligence, clarity, and even caustic humor. Written just after World War II, LTI plots the propagandistic Nazi use of language (and symbols) during the rise and fall of the Third Reich. LTI is also a book that, given its author’s travails, is remarkably absent of bitterness. Though a victim, Klemperer does not write as a victim but rather as a once-captive though now-distant (even with the space of one year) observer to a language simultaneously terrifying and spellbinding. A Dresden Jew who had lived through the dark night of the Third Reich, Klemperer writes about his oppression with cool subjectivity. Yet in his cool subjectivity, Klemperer does not leave Nazism unscathed. Rather, he channels his bile indirectly, via a thousand cuts of satire and mockery. The book is his revenge.

LTI is a compendium of anecdotes about Nazi language (Lingua Tertii Imperii, LTI). To distinguish the book LTI from the linguistic phenomena LTI, I set the former in italics and the latter in roman. Throughout, he shows how the Nazi leadership produced language that was fabulous, mythic, and afloat from the actual or the factual. In such a time as ours, when hyperbole and misdirection are the lingua franca of American political discourse (and media coverage thereof), one can read LTI with feelings of trepidation and an eerie sense of déjà vu. But there is plenty of gallows humor to be had too. Hence this is a book that not only instructs but entertains as well.

Seeded in the 1920s, later years of the LTI nourished the German nationalistic soul, whose heart was devoted to Hitler, Nazism, and the Thousand Year Reich, even if the LTI sometimes flew in the face of etymology. Take, for example, Klemperer’s reading of fanatic and fanaticism. Klemperer [End Page 744] shows that coming out of the Enlightenment, to be thought a fanatic (fanatique) or having succumbed to fanaticism (fantasisme) was to be thought of derisively as someone ungoverned by reason and, if a religious fanatic, a dupe to boot. “Fanatique and fanatisme are words which the French Enlightenment uses as terms of the utmost censure” (59). In Germany, even as late as the 1920s, fanatical (fanatisch) is equally derisive. It “stands alone, untranslatable and irreplaceable, and as a value judgment it is invariably very negatively loaded, it denotes a threatening and repulsive quality” (61). Klemperer points out “that even the LTI sometimes used it negatively. In Mein Kampf Hitler speaks dismissively of ‘Objektivitätsfanatiker (fanatical objectivists)’” (61).

But then, “the word ‘fanatical’ was, throughout the entire era of the Third Reich, an inordinately complimentary epithet. It represents an inflation of the terms ‘courageous,’ ‘devoted’ and ‘persistent’; to be more precise, it is a gloriously eloquent fusion of all these virtues, and even the most innocuous pejorative connotation of the word was dropped from general LTI usage” (62). Klemperer shows that in contradistinction to its root meaning, “fanatical” public proclamations were evidence of zeal and fealty. Approximating magic akin to Orwellian sleight of hand, “fanatical” flipped from shameful epithet to the epitome of virtue. To be fanatical in one’s support of Hitler and Nazism was to be patriotically German in the highest degree. Unfortunately, though Klemperer marks the inversion, he does not account for how it came to be.

Comprising 36 brief chapters, LTI ranges far across the Nazi landscape, from the grandiose to the miniscule. In the chapter titled “The Curse of the Superlative,” Klemperer has great fun skewering the Nazi penchant for inflation and overstatement, both in numbers and language. In the chapter “Boxing,” Klemperer discusses the oafish ways Joseph Goebbels deployed sports metaphors as morale boosters. And in the two-page chapter “Punctuation,” Klemperer defies expectation by explaining why the “ironic...

pdf

Share