LTI: Victor Klemperer’s Notebook on the Language of the Third Reich

Victor Klemperer was a professor of Romance languages at the Technical University of Dresden, a veteran of the First World War, a convert to Protestantism, and a Jew. He lost his post in 1935. He survived the war in a Judenhaus, protected only by his marriage to a non-Jewish woman, and he kept a diary throughout — an act punishable by death, in a house subject to search.

What he recorded was not primarily the persecution, though that is there. It was the language.

LTI — Lingua Tertii Imperii, the language of the Third Reich — was published in 1947 and is a philologist's notebook on how a regime rewrote the way its subjects spoke. Klemperer's central image has never been improved on. Nazism, he wrote, slipped into the flesh and blood of the masses through single words, idioms and sentence structures imposed on them a million times over, taken on mechanically and unconsciously. Language does not simply write and think for me, it increasingly dictates my feelings and governs my entire spiritual being the more unquestioningly and unconsciously I abandon myself to it. And then: words can be like tiny doses of arsenic. They are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and after a little time the toxic reaction sets in.

What he catalogued is specific and worth knowing because the categories recur.

Superlatives everywhere: nothing was large, everything was total, historic, unique, eternal, fanatical — with fanatisch, formerly pejorative, converted into a term of praise. Quantities inflated until they carried no information.

Mechanical and organic metaphors applied to people: the population as a body requiring hygiene, the leader's will transmitted through the movement as through a machine, individuals as material, human beings described with words previously reserved for engineering or livestock.

The compulsory enthusiasm of an entire register in which neutrality became impossible — where there was no available way to describe a policy without approving of it.

And the abbreviations, the endless compound nouns, the technical-sounding constructions that made a program of murder sound like a logistics function.

Klemperer's most disturbing observation is about himself and other victims. He noticed the regime's vocabulary appearing in his own diary, in the speech of Jewish friends, in the letters of people the language was being used to destroy. Nobody was exempt, because linguistic imitation is automatic — the same perception-behavior link that produces the chameleon effect in chapter 41, operating on words.

Which is the mechanism this chapter contributes to the guide, and it is not a metaphor. Exposure to a way of speaking produces the way of speaking, without belief and without consent, and the way of speaking carries the categories.

The practical version, for anyone inside an organization or a movement whose language is shifting: notice which words you have started using that you did not use two years ago, and where you got them. That inventory is cheap to make and reliably uncomfortable.