The earliest scholarly responses to the Third Reich focused strongly on the way the Nazis relied on a feedback loop with the press to influence the flux of language and history. I would like to briefly mention three because they may be helpful resources for beginning to speak about the growing culture of crisis in America today without necessarily feeding into its destabilization.

The philosopher Ernst Cassirer was Rector of Hamburg University before he was dismissed for being Jewish in 1933. His Myth of the State (1946) offered the earliest comprehensive analysis, analyzing the downfall of the Republic as an effect of ‘mythical’ tendencies in German culture. Specifically, Cassirer examined and the dual function of words as semantic and as magical. Whereas the semantic function of language describes a given state of affairs by stating facts, the magical function “tries to produce effects and to change the course of nature” (282-3). Magical speech gains strength, not by proof of relevance, but through repetition and circulation. As bare assertions find evidence for themselves in the world, magical speech solidifies into what Cassirer calls ‘political myth’, and the politician starts to resemble a “public fortuneteller” (289).

The Nazis fashioned words to bolster their worldview. Prefixes like Volk- (People’s) and Juden- (Jewish) have semantic targets but, in use, were affectively charged in excess of their meaning. Trump has already given us examples: ‘#great-’, ‘#fake-’, ‘#failing-’, ‘#crooked-’. More than a secret code, this magical function is what has recently been called ‘dog whistling.’ It is speech that aligns action, even if the code is not conscious or its intent provable. This exceptionally elusive sense of speech is also what Judith Butler (1997) has called the ‘perlocutionary’—the way a word ‘hits’ an audience, whether intentional or not (17-8). At a time where ‘factual’ speech has been put against the ropes, we should be open to examining this magical, perlocutionary force of speech more concretely.

In a second major study, Hannah Arendt (1951) argued that Nazism flourished by destabilizing the temporality of political proclamations. Hitler often displaced his statements into the future tense—i.e. as prophecies. As she writes in Origins of Totalitarianism (1955), “there is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present than by saying that only the future can reveal its merits” (346). After giving these prognostications, the goal of Hitler’s supporters was to delay or re-frame the question for the sake of demonstrating Hitler’s “unending infallibility”. The most effective means of ensuring these, Arendt says, is to warn people of events “bound” to happen in the long run, or which the prophet can control (346).

Just as essential as claiming the future, Arendt says the Nazis also worked to re-shape the past. Communities have always re-constructed the past in a “legendary” way, correcting facts and events in ways that they feel comfortable assuming responsibility for them (208). This makes legends, Arendt argues, “not only among the first memories of mankind, but actually the true beginning of human history” (208). Arendt’s position is, to be sure, radical for modern historians, but the ‘magic’ of historical revision bears serious consideration today, in how histories of oppression and violence are taught to children and the words evoked (or ignored) in the process.

Already in Trump’s presidency, we see revisionist tendencies that work against hard won victories, not least of which regarding the Holocaust’s significance. As Priebus said in response to indignation following Trump’s statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, “If we could wipe it off of the history books, we would. But we can’t.” Is this another dog whistle? Or, perhaps a whistle without a whistler?

Perhaps most relevant today is the work of Victor Klemperer (1947), who was a professor of French Literature in Dresden until he was dismissed in 1935 for being Jewish. Shorn of university resources and access to media, Klemperer’s analyzed what he happened to encounter—bits of Nazi news reels, the appearance of racist commonplaces in otherwise civil interactions. Today, these observations are published as The Language of the Third Reich.

One of the most marked characteristics of Nazi speech, Klemperer observed, was its ironic tone—as noted in writing by ‘scare quotes’. The Nazis used the ironic quotation obsessively, to both “question the truth of what is quoted” and to declare, without commitment, that an opponent’s claims are untrue (68). President Trump has pushed this even further by applying quotes to his own words— to ‘so-called’ judges and ‘tapes’. When Jeffery Lord suggested that Trump is speaking a new dialect—‘Americanese’— eyes rolled when ears should have perked. Such a denial of language as a shared cultural system obfuscates that words have consequences while simultaneously relying on their effects.

In Germany, this style of ironic invective had notable cultural effects. Much like the oddly proud label of ‘deplorable’ today, Klemperer observed that Nazi speech praised ‘fanaticism’—a roundly negative connotation in other times—as a measure of devotion to the Reich (54). Much like Gessen, Klemperer writes that Nazi pronouncements were, in truth, like doses of poison that “permeated the flesh and blood of the people...imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously,” even by the Jews (14). Who among us has not already made a “very bad” joke about “fake news” that is, in reality just “sad”?

In the destruction of sense, the elevation of fanatical politics, and the hunger for belonging within the German volk, Klemperer witnessed an ethically deplorable subjection of the individual mind to a mass culture of uncritical complacency. “The sole purpose of the LTI is to strip everyone of their individuality,” he writes, “to paralyze them as personalities, to make them into unthinking and docile cattle in a herd driven and hounded in a particular direction, to turn them into atoms in a huge rolling block of stone” (21). Arendt and Cassirer would agree. “Not the individuals but the group is the real "moral subject," Cassirer wrote (285). We face this challenge anew in an age of retweets, trolls, and echo chamber politics.

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