Volume 45, Number 19 · December 3, 1998
Destiny in Any Case
By Gordon A. Craig
I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941
by Victor Klemperer, translated by Martin Chalmers
Random House, 519 pp., $29.95
Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten: Tagebücher 1933-1945
by Victor Klemperer, edited by Walter Nowojski
Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, two volumes, 1,691 pp., DM128.00
One of the most remarkable studies of National Socialism in the early postwar years was a small volume entitled LTI (Lingua tertii imperii), which appeared in 1947. Written by a professor of the Technical University of Dresden named Victor Klemperer, it was a brilliantly conceived philological analysis that sought to crystallize the meaning of Nazism from its official language. Klemperer pointed out that, by a deliberate militarization and mechanization of common speech, by the use of superlatives and adjectives of enhancement, by giving positive value to terms that in the past had been used pejoratively (fanaticism, blind obedience), by expressed preference for feeling rather than reason, by the use of euphemisms to cloak reality, and by repetitive stereotyping of opponents, the Nazis had deliberately subverted the language in order to change the way in which the German people thought about politics and life.
Review, 3829 words
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