Introduction: The German Language, National Socialism, and the Shoah

Summary

There Is Seemingly No Escaping the association of the language of Goethe with the language of Hitler. Whatever one may feel about the rather leaden cliché that juxtaposes Buchenwald and Weimar, the disciplines of cultural history, literary criticism, discourse analysis, “Sprachkritik,” and memory studies have all, in their various ways, contributed to a rich field of concepts (“Tätersprache,” “Sprache des Nationalsozialismus” vs. “Sprache im Nationalsozialismus,” “unheimliche Heimat,” and many others) that both describe and embody the ambivalent, uneasy status of the German language and its traditions after the Shoah.

“Sprachkritiker” such as Victor Klemperer suggested that the Lingua Tertii Imperii was a perversion of German that needed to be purged from the language in order to restore its healthy traditions. However, does the notion of “Nazi language” as an identifiably separate entity really hold water, or is it simply a form of linguistic purism analogous to the desire to construct a clear demarcation line between “Germans” and “Nazis”? Is the German language really so fraught with history and violence that constant vigilance and self-reflexivity are necessary, or is neutral or even innocent speech in German still possible in the post-Holocaust world? And do the descendants of victims and of perpetrators have comparable attitudes and responsibilities regarding language, or radically different ones?

The poet Gerschon Ben-David, who had survived the Holocaust as a child with non-Jewish foster parents, and continued to write in German in Israel after his emigration in 1947, wrote strikingly in the 1960s about a longing for authentic communication with non-Jewish Germans and a fear that this communication can only take place in a social context in which language is characterized by cliché and the legacy of the Nazi assault on truth. How possible is it to break old habits and start anew?

Du sagst ich schreibe für tote

aber wie du bin ich

ein versuch

am geläufigen wahn

neue schritte zu bemessen

doch der enteilende

schritt in das jetzt

findet sich nur im verbrauchten

text und mit anderen

For Ben-David, Jewish and non-Jewish speakers of German have similar longings, but the language is both that which connects them and that which divides them. By contrast, Ruth Klüger demonstrates a very different understanding of language.