Details

Subject(s)

• Linguistics—Germany—History—20th century [Browse]
• National socialism [Browse]
• German language—Political aspects [Browse]
• Yiddish language—Political aspects [Browse]
• Racism in language [Browse]
• Germany—Languages—Political aspects [Browse]

Series

• Routledge studies in the history of linguistics ; 1. [More in this series]
• Routledge studies in the history of linguistics ; 1 [More in this series]

Summary note

Many of the ideas of pre-1945 mainstream linguistics had a political impact and, in particular, contributed to the formation of Nazi ideology. Deals with the ideology and cult of the mother-tongue, which in Nazi Germany was no less important than the cult of race. For the Nazis, language embodied the cultural and ethical values of the people and served as a boundary protecting them from assimilation. In the framework of this theory, Jews were a special case because they were regarded as lacking a sense of loyalty to their mother-tongue and having survived due to their uniquely strong racial instinct. Moreover, they seemed to constitute a threat to the German people because they lacked a healthy relationship with the German language and were bearers of universalizing ideologies, dangerous in the post-Versailles world. Dwells on German scholarship on the Yiddish language before 1945, especially on the views of two scholars - Lutz Mackensen and Peter-Heinz Seraphim - for whom Yiddish served as a demonstration of Jewish racial alienation and linguistic perversity. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism).

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

• 1. Whose history?
• 2. The defence of cultural diversity
• 3. Academic politics
• 4. Etymology as collective therapy: Jost Trier's leap of faith
• 5. The strange case of Sonderfuhrer Weisgerber
• 6. 'A complicated young man with a complicated fate, in a complicated time': Heinz Kloss and the ethnic missionaries of the Third Reich
• 7. Yiddish linguistics and National Socialism
• 8. Vitalist linguistics, linguistics as theosophy and characterology
• 9. Linguistics, race and the horror of assimilation.

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Other title(s)

Linguistics and the 3rd Reich

ISBN

• 0415189543
• 9780415189545

LCCN

98013546

OCLC

38520156

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