More from Klemperer on the LTI

The Lingua Tertii Imperii, the language of the Third Reich, infected everyone in Germany, albeit to varying degrees. One of the big questions that Klemperer grapples with in his book, yet never quite resolves, is what drove previously decent, thinking people - scholars and intellectuals much like himself and whom he had considered colleagues before the War - to become devotees of the Nazi Party. For all the observation and critical examination that he engaged in close-up at first hand in the War, the note of puzzlement, of disappointment, is still striking with every example of such an intellectual betrayal that he recounts, right down to the last chapter.

It was indeed a pervasive thing, this "language that thinks for you." He describes a friendly (Gentile) woman in the factory where he was a laborer:

Frieda [the woman] knew that my wife was lying ill at home. In the morning I found a big apple in the middle of my machine. I looked over to Frieda's work-place and she nodded to me. A little later she was standing next to me: 'For Mama with my best wishes.' And then with a mixture of inquisitiveness and surprise: 'Albert says that your wife is German. Is she really German?'

The pleasure in the apple was gone. This Sancta-Simplicitas soul, whose feelings were entirely un-Nazi and humane, had been infected by the most fundamental ingredient of the National Socialist poison; she identified Germanness with the magical concept of the Aryan; it was barely conceivable to her that a German woman could be married to me, to a foreigner, a creature from another branch of the animal kingdom; ...

Elsewhere in the LTI he reminds himself of the philologist's old dictum: that although two people may use the same phrase, they need not share the same motivation in using the same phrase. Here, however, it is clear that the words had controlled Frieda's thinking, and not the other way around. The concepts of 'German' and 'Jew' had existed for ages. What the Nazis did was to surreptitiously and thoroughly replace the old concepts with a new, racial one. Similar, and yet different, but not different enough to warrant new words for the new concepts; they instead took over the old words, and slipped all the more easily into people's minds as a result. The most insidious aspect of LTI may hence have been where it retained old words and gave them new meanings, rather than all the new coinages for which it was responsible.