Twice a month, The duty challenges enthusiasts of philosophy and the history of ideas to decipher a topical issue based on the theses of a prominent thinker.
To express the complexity of a changing world, it goes without saying that a living language is enriched with borrowings and neologisms. Similarly, it is required that, to illustrate or clarify a message, the language uses tropes, hyperboles, euphemisms and other tricks of language. Talented authors manage to handle them with admirable virtuosity!
But there are times like ours when borrowings and neologisms — sometimes used in the wrong way, sometimes roughly — crowd the public space to give the impression of a corruption of citizen dialogue. What is astonishing is the suddenness with which these terms insinuate themselves into social conversation, as well as the militant determination of some to demand that they be immediately adopted by all. We have therefore seen the emergence in the media space of words and expressions – “decolonial”, “resulting from diversity” and a whole range of “… phobias” – often ignored by recent versions of linguistic correctors such as Antidote. Similarly, we will have noted the promptness with which the expression “freedom convoy” was admitted without critical regard (and often without quotation marks), suggesting that the occupants of Ottawa in the winter of 2022 are authentic champions of freedom.
Aberrant examples of language manipulation that can lead to a distortion of the message are excellently expressed in certain dystopias, such as the 1984 of Orwell. The real meets fiction in the discourse of totalitarian regimes. Nazi Germany used these tricks to make the language the instrument of a criminal regime. Some of these processes persist today, producing “words that think for us”.
Certainly, it would be abusive to maintain that the expressions mentioned above come from a language related to the Nazi language. However, the militant, sustained vigor with which they seek to impose this newspeak in common use shows a quest for power that should be of concern, if only as a preventive measure.
The language of IIIe Reich
Pinpointing the language of Nazi power, sniffing out its pitfalls and demonstrating its perversion is the task that Victor Klemperer (1881-1960), professor of philology in Dresden and specialist in French Enlightenment literature, set himself. Decorated for a feat of arms during the 1914-1918 war, he sees himself as a German patriot despite his Jewish origins. Banned from teaching and research by the Nazi regime because of his Jewishness, and experiencing a painful vexation, he persists in identifying with German culture.
It was to keep, he said, “the pendulum without which I would have fallen a hundred times” that he kept his personal diary from 1933 to 1945. The only material that remains accessible to him is the language gleaned by stealth from the small shops, in the media and among his relatives. Collected under the title LTI (Lingua tertii imperiithe language of IIIe Reich), his notes appeared in 1947 in the Soviet sector of occupied Germany. The diarist is the witness of this Nazi language which he presents as a tool acting insidiously on the spirits, “a language which one ingests unconsciously like a poison”.
“Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: you swallow them without noticing […] and lo and behold, after a while the effect is felt”, writes Victor Klemperer.
The LTI is installed thanks to a populism which nourishes the resentment of the German masses shaken by the trauma following the Great War. It is spreading in all social classes regardless of cultural level and is embedded in everyday language. Klemperer is sorry to find it among his linguist colleagues: “None of them were Nazis, but they were all intoxicated. Expelled from their home, Klemperer and his wife were relegated to a “Jewish house” in Dresden. And even there, in the ghetto, he finds the LTI in these Jewish victims of Nazism and is surprised to use it himself, blindly, like a tic of language.
A poor and depraved language
The main characteristic that Klemperer finds in the language of the IIIe Reich is his extreme poverty. A language “wretched in principle”, which does not seek to convince; because to convince is to argue, to consent to dialogue. And except for “the Jew”, nothing is more execrated by the Nazis than rational debate. Unfit to think, irrational, the LTI is only able to express impressions, moods. Fundamentally demagogic, it seeks to make itself accessible to the people, even when it feigns learned airs and claims to express a “vision of the world”.
This restricted language has an alienating performative function. In the Nazi salute, to the cry ” siege “, the crowd responds by shouting” Heil », right arm outstretched: it is a sworn act, an oath of allegiance (Gefolgschaft). “What does a perfect Gefolgschaft ? She doesn’t think and she doesn’t feel either — she follows. To attend a speech by Hitler is to “live an experience”. Aren’t we told in the ads that consuming a particular product will make us “live an experience”?
Nazi speech depraves the meaning of words. So it is with the word “fanatic”, which, from pejorative, becomes laudatory: “fanatic faith, fanatic will, fanatic courage”. The fanatic finds himself transfigured into a hero, says Klemperer: “If someone, instead of ‘heroic and virtuous’, says ‘fanatic’ for long enough, he will come to truly believe that a fanatic is a virtuous hero and that , without fanaticism, one cannot be a hero. »
Euphemisms mask repressions and unmentionable failures by trivializing them. The most sinister are “the final solution” and “work makes free”, both inseparable from the extermination camps. Deportations are “evacuations”, and one does not go to the Gestapo, one “reports oneself” or one “leaves without leaving an address”, for Auschwitz for example. Is the situation becoming critical, even desperate? Goebbels attenuates it: it is only “fragile”, at worst “in crisis”, a “controlled and temporary” crisis.
LTI uses and abuses hyperbole, which Klemperer believes is inspired by Hollywood commercials. Superlatives, such as “eternal”, “historical”, “unique”, as in “eternal people”, “Eternal Reich”, “historical and unique victory”, are typical of Nazi discourse. The number 1000 is also mythologized: “1000 achievements, 1000 celebrations, the Reich for 1000 years”. These linguistic excesses, Klemperer already sees them “in germ in romanticism”, this nazified romanticism carrying excess which brings together heroism and prosaism, bombastic sentimentalism and coarseness. It’s Novalis staying with Barnum!
The LTI and us
As the 1984 of Orwell, of which it is the exact contemporary, Klemperer’s LTI has pedagogical value for our time. By unmasking the pitfalls of language, she invites us to maintain a critical sense of words that tend to mislead citizen dialogue, regardless of the ideology they serve.
Klemperer reminds us of the role of the means of communication of the time (loudspeakers, radio, cinema) in the dissemination of Nazi propaganda and warns us of the dangers of a poor language made up of slogans, with vitiated speech. Above all, he rejects this false and harmful idea according to which the abusive reduction of language promotes citizen dialogue.
Doesn’t the current cultural context encourage the use of a weak language that is unsuitable for citizen communication similar to the LTI, although different? Isn’t the characteristic of social networks (Facebook, Twitter) to favor a poor and reduced language, but whose scope has far more impact than that of the media of a century ago?
Our media space is already cluttered with words and expressions that say badly or in a biased way about our world. What can be said of this ideological discourse which uses English words which often turn out to be bad grafts once Frenchified and which end up becoming “these words which think in our place”, as Patrick Moreau has clearly shown in a work entitled eponym of this expression inspired by Klemperer?
This is one of the traps set by cultural globalization, which promotes an excessively simplified language under the pretext of a discourse accessible to all. “Globish”, this globalized English – poor in content, but imperial in means –, today stands out as a supposedly universal language. Some – such as Philippe Van Parijs, the Belgian philosopher and economist – prescribe it as democratic progress: “The response to Europe’s democratic deficit […] is to speed up the process so that English [devienne] the means for the poorest Europeans to make themselves heard. A rough version of English, with a vocabulary limited to a few hundred words, would suffice,” he wrote in The Economist under the title of ” Tea Globish-Speaking Union “.
Strange recommendation that this call for an “approximate language with a vocabulary limited to a few hundred words”. How not to see a poverty reminiscent of the LTI? For, as Klemperer notes: [La langue du IIIe Reich] was not poor just because everyone was forced to line up [elle], but above all because, in a freely chosen restriction, it completely expressed only one side of the human being. »
Suggestions ? Write to Robert Dutrisac: [email protected].