{"id":29176,"date":"2021-01-11T07:57:55","date_gmt":"2021-01-11T15:57:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.heuermontage.com\/?p=29176"},"modified":"2021-01-11T07:57:58","modified_gmt":"2021-01-11T15:57:58","slug":"language-as-tool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.heuermontage.com\/?p=29176","title":{"rendered":"Language as Tool"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In 1995 the German publishing house Aufbau-Verlag printed two volumes of diaries<\/a>, covering the years 1933 to 1945. They were written by Victor Klemperer, a German Jewish professor of Roman languages, who had survived the Holocaust. The diaries won great acclaim both in Germany and later in English translation in the US – Peter Gay, in his review<\/a> for the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>, declared them a collective masterpiece and referred to Klemperer as \u201cone of the greatest diarists\u2014perhaps the greatest\u2014in the German language.\u201d Klemperer had been dead for over 30 years by the time of publication, having spent his post-Holocaust years in his hometown of Dresden, chronicling life in East Germany as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Immediately after the war, Klemperer published a small book, a lexicon of what he called Lingua tertii imperii<\/em>\u00a0(“the language of the Third Reich”<\/a>), in which he noted and analyzed the rhetorical giveaways of the regime in painstaking detail. Equal part linguistic analysis and survivor’s memoir, the book describes many of the rhetorical tools that we see in abominal revival in our current political landscape. (It is a hard read, on many levels.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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On the Eerie Prescience of a Nazi-Era Diarist<\/a><\/blockquote>