The Vocation of Writing by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438469621
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2018-07-15T05:00:00+00:00

7

a “balancing pole” over the Abyss

(Victor Klemperer and the Language of the Third Reich)

The power of totalitarian systems does not rest solely with the terror that they put into place, the terror that makes everyone fear for their survival and the survival of their loved ones. It is also distinguished by the hold they have over minds. There is thus no totalitarian system that does not begin by brigading universities, censoring presses and banning the newspapers hostile to it, muzzling the journalists, writers, professors, and other intellectuals liable to voice any opposition while making use of others. Yet, because every consciousness cannot be controlled permanently, because no organization or repressive apparatus is capable of surveillance over every word, much less over the thoughts of those submitted to the constraints imposed by these systems, such measures constitute only the most immediately visible part of their hold. It is not through these visible measures, in other words, that they manage to make millions of men and women feel, think, and reason in unison with the violence that distinguishes them. The efficacy of propaganda must be added. Yet, propaganda is effective only insofar as its semantic innovations, its turns of phrase, and its ways of saying and doing with a language understood by everyone end up imposing themselves as evident, to the point that they no longer upset or cause indignation in those that, more and more numerous, start reproducing them mechanically. The hold over minds is never so strong as when language itself is infected by ideological words. Now, the most dreadful part of this infection is the fact that it is insidious. The substitutions of one meaning for another, the shifts in the value of words, and the innovations imposed by such systems do not come about all in the same stroke through a prescribed reform. They occur unnoticed even by their first victims. In order to make an inventory of them, to list them, even to decrypt them, to measure them in all their gravity, one needs—one needed, consequently, in Germany, Italy, Russia, China, Japan, and Cambodia, everywhere that the government was conceived with a hold of this order—an intelligence endowed with competence and knowledge, an intelligence prepared for such inquiries by the habit of tracking all the ruses of language in texts, an intelligence that contains the force and courage not to concede to the new “spirit of the times.” One needs, in other words, a philologist who keeps his eyes open and his ears listening like “a balancing pole over the abyss.”

A performance by a tightrope walker on a rope stretched over the void with nothing for a balancing pole except the analysis of the transformations Nazi ideology inflicted on the German language! These are in fact the terms in which Victor Klemperer summarizes how, for twelve years (1933–1945) and in the most difficult conditions, he applied his philological competence, as a specialist in French Enlightenment authors, to a rigorous critique of the “linguistic violence” of the Third

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