Today is Hitler's birthday, an anniversary once celebrated in the Third Reich with religious intensity. As late as 1945, many Germans believed that come April 20, the Führer would unleash amazing secret weapons that would turn the war around. Ten days after his birthday that year, Hitler was dead, however, and the Nazi segment of the great nightmare of the twentieth century was over.
In his invaluable book LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen (1947; see link above)*, the philologist Victor Klemperer, who himself almost became a victim of the Shoah, argues cogently that it was through cunning distortion of the German language that Hitler bewitched his faithful. LTI's epigraph is from Franz Rosenzweig: "Language is more than blood."
We ought to reflect on what this might mean for us. What is language, and especially the various dialects of political correctness, Left and Right, and the frivolous bamboozlement of academe that one associates with names like Heidegger and Derrida, doing to us today?
If one thinks about it, Hitler could conceivably have been stopped without a preemptive war. What if, instead of bolting its gates, the United States had simply said to the Nazis in the 1930s: Sure, send us your Jews! We’ll take them all! And if you happen to have any other good people you don’t want, send them over here too! America would have benefited immeasurably, of course, as indeed it did from the talents of the handful of European Jews who managed to get here (Einstein, Segré, Schoenberg, Kurt Weill . . . and the list goes on) and the rug would have been pulled from under the Nazis’ feet. They would been shown up for what they were: a vile, ridiculous, and ultimately pathetic set of gangsters. If the United States (already long the number one industrial power and in many ways culturally dominant in the world) had resolutely rejected antisemitism in this way (and perhaps even mocked the Nazis as idiots for giving away such valuable human capital) in the mid 1930s, Hitler’s psychological base of support among Germans--and even his own self-confidence--would have been drastically undermined. In many ways, Hitler saw antisemitism as the strongest card he had (which is why the extermination machinery of the Holocaust would later be given priority even over the war effort). Moreover, by the very same magnificent act, the United States would have undercut the Comintern as well, because countless Jewish communists (Zinoviev, Litvinov, Pauker, Slansky . . . and the list goes on) would no longer fatally have imagined Stalinism to be the sole antidote to antisemitism.
And the unending catastrophe of Israel/Palestine might also have been avoided . . .
If the United States failed to act decisively against the Nazis in this way in the 1930s, it was largely because of the ingrained racism of a large part of the American ruling classes at that time. It was not for nothing that Hitler kept a life-sized portrait of Henry Ford in his office.
And that racism too was nourished in innumerable ways by language.
*Translated by Martin Brady as The Language of the Third Reich: A Philologist's Notebook (London: Continuum, 2002)
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