The Language of the New Brutality
▻http://www.e-flux.com/journal/83/141286/the-language-of-the-new-brutality
Following the defeat of Nazism, Victor Klemperer, a Jewish philologist and professor of romance studies, published LTI—Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen, a series of linguistic insights based on diaries kept under a certain imperative: “observe, study and memorize what is going on—by tomorrow everything will already look different, by tomorrow everything will already feel different; keep hold of how things reveal themselves at this very moment and what the effects are.”1 Translated into English as The Language of the Third Reich, Klemperer’s astonishing analysis of the language of Nazism, and his account of what it took to survive the genocidal regime, remains the template for any future understanding of the role that language plays in reactionary and fascist times. “Language reveals all,” Klemperer writes.
The most powerful influence was exerted neither by individual speeches nor by articles or flyers, posters or flags; it was not achieved by things which one had to absorb by conscious thought or conscious emotions. Instead Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously.2
Under the New Brutality, we may wonder what the words, idioms, and sentence structures of our own times might be, what “tiny doses of arsenic” we are swallowing, which words have changed their values, which words have disappeared, how the way we speak and write is changing, and with what detrimental effects.
Klemperer describes the language of the Third Reich as no longer drawing a distinction between spoken and written language, such that “everything was oration, had to be address, exhortation, invective.”3 Fanaticism becomes a virtue.
