Nazi vocabulary of love, faith, and homeland functioned as criminal language

Evidence

Blumenthal’s article, which opens with a quote from Talleyrand as an epigraph (“La parole a ete donnee a l’homme pour deguiser sa pensee,” speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts), includes a discussion of the colloquial character of LTI (Blumenthal mentions Klemperer’s work in a footnote), as well as a note on how unusual it is. “In no [linguistic] sryle, except for the Nazi style, would such a high number of terms be used as readiness for self-sacrifice, love and faith, loyalty and honesty, the motherland,” moledet, “and the people” (Blumenthal, “On the Nature,” 41). Blumenthal focuses on a language that would have been used exclusively by the perpetrators. and he announces, perhaps, some of the recent debates surrounding Daniel Goldhagen’s argument, going so far as to suggest, at the end of the article, that this “use,” shimush, of the Nazi-language raises a legal question: “we might be able to reach a conclusion as to the dissemination of the Nazi language in the German people. And since this language is the language of criminals, the legal questionemerges of the criminal responsibility of those who used it” (55). — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 1188

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• QUESTION: The claim that mere use of the Nazi idiom might ground criminal liability is a striking legal-philosophical provocation worth pursuing — how would a court adjudicate language use as complicity?
• SHARE: For anyone interested in Klemperer’s LTI or the linguistic study of perpetrator speech — Blumenthal’s 1957 Yad Vashem article anticipated Goldhagen’s later argument.
• ADDENDUM: The gentleness of the positive vocabulary (love, faith, loyalty) as a masking of atrocity connects to the ‘immodesty’ article’s theme of language as class/identity/political signaling, though the link is thematic.

Related

• Nazi language’s distinctiveness was already analyzed at Yad Vashem in 1957. (similarity 0.89)