On the Edge of the Holocaust by Aizenberg Edna;

Author:Aizenberg, Edna;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brandeis University Press

Lingua Tertii Imperii

I’d like to pause further on two aspects of Guimarães Rosa’s diary: his emphasis on what Victor Klemperer named the Lingua Tertii Imperii (LTI), the language of the Third Reich; and directly connected to the Nazi-speak, the persecution of the Jews. The vice-consul filled his log with articles cut and pasted from the German-language newspapers of the day, often as exemplars of Hitler’s manipulation of facts through words. Georg Otte, who translated these articles into Portuguese, writes himself a perceptive memo in a footnote: “To look into further—the strong presence of war rhetoric in an apparently informational text: The link between Nazism and propaganda and its relation to fictions that go beyond reality.” Put another way, the fact-fiction link as construed by Nazism infuriated yet intrigued Rosa, whose writings sought precisely to explore the murky fact-fiction in-between, but in a way that questioned deceit.

Borges, another explorer of that twilight zone through a creative narrative style, the ficción, had similar discomfort about Nazi “unreality”: “El nazismo adolece de irrealidad, como los infiernos de Erígena. Es inhabitable: los hombres sólo pueden morir por él, mentir por él, matar y ensangrentar por él” (Nazism suffers from unreality, like Erigena’s hell. It is uninhabitable: men can only die for it, lie for it, kill and maim for it) (“Anotación al 23 de agosto de 1944,” OC, 728). Could “unreality,” both Borges and Guimarães Rosa ask, be used differently, by means of linguistic multiplicity and polyvalent sense, not bloodying foreclosure of sense?

Many of the articles pasted into Guimarães Rosa’s diary deal with the aerial bombing, and they open with the salute that signals entry into the “unreality” of the LTI, staged by the master of the Big Lie, Joseph Goebbels: “The Hamburg Ministry of Propaganda announces.” The diplomat skilled in diplomatic lingo was keeping a record of the official version of events perfectly concordant with Klemperer’s descriptions of the “fairy-tale quality” of Goebbels’s production (Klemperer, 202).

The communiqués emphasize veracity in a set pattern. The RAF raids injure and kill, and inevitably miss their targets thanks to the marvelous flak antiaerial defenses, hitting civilian buildings. The Führer, in contrast, has forbidden destruction of the enemy’s nonmilitary interests. One lengthy pasted item reads in part, “This crime also cannot be justified in the eyes of the English people when it finds out the truth. Suffice it to say that Mr. Churchill should anxiously wait for the day of reckoning both with us and with his own people, when together with his war strategy against Greater Germany that he hates, his huge, never-before-seen edifice of lies will crumble. As we have already said: the future will bring the truth” (“Major Aerial Attack on Hamburg,” or “Ataque aéreo extenso a Hamburgo,” November 16, 1940).5 What makes this dispatch especially heinous is that it appeared right after the English city of Coventry was wiped out by Luftwaffe bombers on November 14, 1940, one of the watershed blitz raids of the world war, in which civilians were indiscriminately slaughtered and the cathedral was reduced to ashes.

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