As illustrated, Scarry therefore outlines her metaphoric extension of the body ..... opportunities for unity were staged for dramatic effect, creating Stunden der ... continuing to defy the commitment to ongoing manual labor which had ... Page 16 ...
Chapter XI:
Language in the State and State of Exception “Domination itself is servile when beholden to opinion, for you depend upon the prejudices of those you govern by means of their prejudices.”i
“It is not a question of suppressing the spoken language, but of giving words approximately the importance they have in dreams.”ii
Chapter XI: Language in the State…
Language is not examined independently as one of the three contributing factors to Shoah because it is not a social epiphenomenon, as is rationality/irrationality, legality or identity, It is sui generis, incomparable to that which it engenders, such as tradition or culture. Language encompassed by the Reich state defied Wittgenstein – to that which the state could not speak, it did; further it produced a speech especially shaped and engineered to pre-‐ emptively counter any claims of legitimacy the homo viator may have found in his attempts to communicate, to survive even, within the new Nazi regime. These claims of legitimacy expressed in both verbal and non-‐verbal expression were usurped by the primacy of the Nazi lexicon and gestural monopoly. Language was at once the ballast and vehicle by which to support and further factors of rationality/irrationality and legality employed in identity formation. Lexical items could therefore be as geographically or physically bound to either the Reich state or Auschwitz, depending on the context and intent. Thereby rather than drawing on state signifiers for death and hate coined for the barest comprehension of a citizen, such as Sonderbehandlung (“special treatment”), those in the physical state of exception and those constructing camp mechanisms relied on the terms that were openly abusive and geared towards dominance of SS, such as Vernichtungsstelle, (“extermination institute”). It is the continuing academic and cultural norm to paradoxically label the preponderance of Nazi items signifying the national project of oppressive and genocidal traits as “euphemisms”, as derived from “eu”, the Greek prefix of “good, beneficial.” However, the monstrosity of the Nazi vocabulary isolates itself in the absolute opposite category as both a semantic and phonetic
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cacophony and kinesthetic abhorrence. It is the purpose of this chapter to deconstruct this linguistic and gestural dissonance whereby to illustrate how Reich linguistically dissimulated then and distributed its genocidal project. This chapter investigates two binary categories selected for both their universal presence in communication techniques and their extraordinary manipulation for new and perverted operation in the Nazi regime: verbal/gestural and propaganda/daily communication. The two categories examine the role of language as an operation in the daily and bodily realm of the citizen. The discussion of these two binaries is inclusively framed within both the state and in the state of exception, in order to display the constant possibilities for morphological and semantic innovation between the two spheres. It is the goal of this chapter to illustrate how these methods of interpersonal linguistics each contributed to the means by which the genocidal project was laid out and enacted by the Nazi citizenry and state. The literal movements of an agent within his habitus, or typical social spaces inside the state or state of exception evinces the manner by which language engenders the agent’s reality. iii His language, just as his movement, is limited by the quality and quantity of power contained in his social capital. This power produces a tangible condition of possibility for by which an agent’s reality is actualized; significantly, the language operated is the power re-‐produced which in each interaction could serve to his benefit or detriment. These interactions as occurrences in variegated locations of geography and loci of state enunciated purpose is manifested through the re-‐signification of state specific lexical items and linguistic tokens, the latter of which as verbal or gestural. The malleability of meaning evinced in heterogeneous state zones thus serves as a spotlight illuminating the locus of language’s strength “in the interplay between… two aspects of meaning and in the room for development afforded by the adaptability of conventions.iv
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Verbal communication is defined in this thesis as a meaningful exchange between members of a linguistic community via transcribed and oral methods. Gestural communication as general, unsubstantiated term contains a myriad of bodily possibilities; however, in this chapter the term refer to the kinesthetic movements which can either contain a common meaning which does not require the aid of speech or serve as a complement to the primary speech operation. In regards to the substantive difference between the state propaganda and the speech of daily correspondence is intent. The state’s primary motivation when disseminating a novel propaganda item was to offer to the state new instructions, commands, impersonal interrogations, whereas the intent of daily communication in the Nazi state, and elsewhere, encompasses a far greater range of possibility, from the mundane, phatic greeting to the intimate, deeply inter-‐personal sharing of unguarded emotion. However, this accessibility of sincere interaction in the quotidian conversation carries the additional contingencies for a denial or lie, or even of a statement turning-‐back on itself, as Scarry argues, “…each verbal utterance has at all times the explosive duality of being at once very possibly true and very possibly false...v It is no coincidence that Nazi Party informers more frequently reported their friends and family, close relations who had revealed anti-‐Party emotion inadvertently through the spontaneous intimacy characterizing daily speech. I.
Verbal … the voice becomes a final source of self extension; so long as one is speaking, the self extends out beyond the boundaries of the body, occupies a space much larger than the body… Their ceaseless talk articulates their unspoken understanding that only in silence do the edges of the self become vi coterminous with the edges of the body it will die with.
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As illustrated, Scarry therefore outlines her metaphoric extension of the body through the articulated voice. When the voice has been silenced, whether literally or figuratively, similarly has the body been denied its opportunity for continued presence. A death, metaphorically, has begun for the silenced figure. This metaphoric death takes shape in the Reich state and state of exception through the homo viator; he who has been denied his voice in the state finds his body denied experience and vitality in the camp. The guard and doctor are privileged with the voice in both realms, as demonstrated through the guards’ continuous creation and coinage of neologisms; liquidiert (“liquidated”), Liquidierung des Judentums (“liquidation of Jewry”), erledigt (“finished off”), Sonderaktionen (“special actions”), Sonderbehandlung (“special treatment”), Vollzugstatigkeit (“execution activity”), entsprechend behandelt (“treated appropriately”), Bereinigung der Judenfrage (“cleaning up of the Jewish question”), and juden frei gemacht (“made free of Jews”).vii As the popularization of these terms implies, the guards’ voice remained as present and unthreatened as his body. Through this dichotomous relationship of guard’s articulated voice to the sacer’s de-‐signified body, the Nazi “mime of power” presented itself once more, “for power is in its fraudulent as in its legitimate forms is always based on distance from the body.”viii One of the most well known terms from the Nazi lexicon is “Die Endlösung” (“Final Solution”). The implications and unspoken purpose of the phrase were as clear to the Nazi officials as fiercely contested its literal translation, a contestation especially well recorded in the heated exchange between Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson and Hermann Goering during the Nuremberg Trials. The matter concerning the meaning and translation of the phrase arose again twenty years later, at Eichmann’s own trial in 1961. Eichmann, not surprisingly, had coined the
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phrase, then using it in all his subsequent documents. He later explained, during an attempt to mitigate his personal responsibility for the genocide, “I suggested these words. At the time I meant by this the elimination of the Jews, their marching out of the German nation. Later… these harmless words were used as camouflage for the killing.”ix Eichmann’s excuses aside, the term itself serves as a useful linguistic representation for one of the (im)potential fallacies in semiological analysis: “In the linguistic model, nothing enters the language without having been tried in speech, but conversely, no speech is accessible… if it is not drawn from the “treasure” of the language.”x The term ‘Final Solution’, in other words, could only have summoned or sustained its monstrous power and constant use through its clear possibilities for individual understanding and lexical functionality. Eichmann’s excuse alludes to one of the few mutual factors between Party speech and the intimate dialogue: the ongoing reliance for metaphors metaphors to relay a speaker’s ideas, concepts, goals, and strategies which are otherwise incomprehensible to the listener. Lakoff and Johnson describe metaphors as, “not merely things to be seen beyond. In fact one can see beyond them only by using other metaphors. It is though the ability to comprehend experience through metaphor were a sense… providing the only ways to perceive and experience much of the world.”xi Through metaphors, state speeches urging on the oppression of the homo sacer most frequently employed metaphors. Through this lexical placeholders, the regime propaganda could set forth one anti-‐Semitic concept or visual depiction of Jewish thievery and despite the diversity of the Reich population, inevitably generate a responsive comprehension through each individual’s mental associations to that concept or depiction. Through this manipulation of just a
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single figure of speech, a cautious, momentary but genuine parity could unite the single citizen to the state body. II.
Non-‐Verbal/Gestural
The fluidity of the state instruction’s transference of into common, non-‐verbal habits of individuals was most clearly displayed in the common Reich greeting, which under Hitler’s rule ‘became (an) expression of the individual’s inner acceptance of the allegiance demanded by others.”xii Allert’s interpretation of the regime’s strict employment of bodily gestures and rituals of gestural social acknowledgment differs from the traditional analysis of greetings, which tend to facilitate communication between two or more people in the same spatial and temporal location with an array of options for greeting sequences and opportunities to express a unique self in a micro-‐social process. It is apparent a drastic shift occurred from the basic element of acknowledgment popularized in the Weimar greetings to greetings with explicit and novel political functions. Through the constraints exercised deliberately by the Nazi this drastic shift altered reasons for and methods in speech production; a highly significant move which, according to Artaud, required the complete re-‐interpretation of speech in a “concrete and spatial sense, combining it with everything… significant in the concrete domain – to manipulate it like a solid object…”xiii In other words, in order to maintain the new meaning and function of a gesture inscribed in the typical Nazi greeting, its verbal accompaniment had to reflect and reinforce this meaning and function as well. Similar to Mary Douglas’ argument discussed in Chappter III is Hugh Dalziel Duncan’s thesis Symbols in Society, proposing whomever controls the creation and distribution of images
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used in daily communication controls the whole of society. Further, who controls that communication then has the monopoly over the official national memory of the past, of the nation’s historical recollection.xiv Through the authority to monitor and radicalize discourse in each variegated node constituting national population, a coeval authority emerges, granting access to redefine and reinvent societal possibilities. Artaud claims that verbal aspects of language which remain viable and plausible as systems for speech production are only shadows, base ‘responses’ in the collective theatre of communication, it is in fact through the petrifaction of gesture that entire ranges of communicative possibilities, the ‘true abstractions’ potential in speech and gesture are achieved, “… for besides the language of words, there is the culture of gestures.”xv This range of possibility remained under strict control in the Nazi state, where linguistic novelties would be introduced or constantly practiced with the entire citizenry during mass rallies and parades, as though to prevent any misinterpretation or subversive re-‐presentation of its meaning or physical method of display. One such example of the state monopoly over a gesture and accompanying verbal enunciation was the Hitler salute, in which the right arm is extended from the chest at a 45* angle tilted slightly to the right, with a simultaneous exclamation “Heil Hitler!” and clicking of the heels. This salute, which exercised the full range of the body and voice during the regime, has continued on as a movement and utterance still monopolized by the Nazi state, a two fold illustration which particularly demonstrates Artaud’s above statement on the potential of the ‘culture of gestures.’ The charged environment of altered and un-‐made familiar or known gesturexvi unfolded as part of the ongoing dehumanizing project wrecked upon the viator: to unmake his world was
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to unmake his originality and previously unquestioned right to exist. This externalization of the viator’s figurative disintegration was represented through the state’s de-‐objectification and subsequent re-‐signification of certain objects previously taken for granted. Two examples of this dual step towards dehumanization are the shower heads in the gas chambers and the trucks used for transporting the victims, both of which are explored in more detail in Chapter XII. The differentiation of purpose was exhibited through the converted use of objectsxvii unique to the camp, for example, the prisoner barracks. From its interior structure purposely quashing occupants, to its temporary architectural materials metaphorically signifying the temporary state of the occupants, the semiotics of the barracks continuously harmed the body of the sacer in order to hasten both psychological and physical demise. As clarified by Scarry, this unfolding process of the sacer’s death had in fact begun with the state’s denial of his viator history, his legitimacy as a citizen: Whenever death can be designated as “soon” the dying has already begun… dying not because he has yet experienced the damage that will end his life but because he has begun to experience the body that will end his life, the body that can be killed, and which when killed will carry away the xviii conditions that allow him to exist.
III.
Propaganda
Who in the state delegated the force behind certain words? How does this originary force remain intact once distributed among each citizen and civil organization, considering the natural habit for individuals to imbue and digest new and unfamiliar terms with meaning provided through personals frames of references? Horkheimer, himself profoundly influenced by the Nazi regime, addresses this problem by explaining the potential danger in granting State control over reason, and ultimately rationality.xix Adorno adds to this unflattering conceptualization of State
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and its potentially fascist grip over language by presenting language as a system thrown into an intentional state of chaos and seeming disorganization by the State in order to maintain a capitalist system over the people and the various state power relations.xx Unfortunately, common citizens further their own unknowing manipulation by repeating the stereotypes and false truths popularized and distributed in the public forum. Thus, the full crisis which germinated in the Nazi regime through the perversion of language comes to light at the nexus of these two philosophers’ theories. The State is capable of manipulating situations and people by manipulating their language, or ‘jargon’, and language use. Through power gathered in that original manipulation, the State perpetuates ever increasingly violent stereotypes and prejudices among its population. It becomes simpler to forget the internal problems of the society when there is a common enemy to hate, as Marcuse outlined in One-‐Dimensional Man. Echoing these thoughts, Agamben also urges one to be “…only your face. Go to the threshold. Do not remain the subject of your properties or faculties, do not stay beneath them; rather, go with them, in them, beyond them.”xxi
Nazi propaganda was not merely the “means of affecting the use of mass media of
communications, the manner in which a mass audience perceives and ascribes the meaning to the material world;”xxii it was a unique combination of mythical and practical/political speech and historical civil conception. “At many points German biases became indistinguishable from National Socialist thought, a situation the Party exploited by claiming sole authority to define genuine Germanness.”xxiii Part of this Germanness was the acceptance of the stereotyped ideal of the Jews, which was expressed in “virulent resentment.” This acceptance was necessary because belief constantly undergoes its own verification through production, and thus the power of words
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“is a belief in the legitimacy of the words and he who utters them, a belief which words themselves can’t produce.”xxiv The production of linguistic elements in propaganda therefore performed beyond the mere mono-‐dimensional utilitarian speech act, perpetually limited to basic expressions such as delineating friend from foe. It was also the force behind radio and movie propaganda encapsulating ideas such as ‘nationalism’, which had taken hold over the ever creative German imagination. Through common linguistic elements vocalized and displayed repeatedly in conjunction with certain words or phrases during state radio and film programs, the usual individualization process through which imagery connects to words begins to become a communal process with similar images connecting to similar phrase. Significantly, when this collective process of a collective bonding through the visual, verbal, and oral senses deals with the establishment of anti-‐Semitic attitudes or oppressive legislative mechanisms, parallels between the Nazi rejection ritual and the ancient Greek and Roman once more emerge. Further state maneuvers to gain and maintain collective control over associative processes eventually took on form in an all encompassing propaganda system resembling a tri-‐ level pyramid. The lowest tier, composed largely of blatantly untrue stereotypes ala Julius Streicher, was for the benefit of the uneducated and uncritical. The second middle tier focused on the generally well educated, middle income families or young professionals who were unwilling to accept an open persecution of neighbors without at least a lightly theoretical basis and largely visual explication of the Jewish damage and danger to the Reich. The third and highest tier was composed of the most ‘scientifically’ justified propaganda. This minute level was shaped for the benefit of intellectuals, scientists, and lawyers. Drawing on phrenology studies
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conducted in the pre-‐Nazi state in universities and in the asylums during the Aktion T4, this method of propaganda justified eugenics and extermination couched in heavy scientific or otherwise field specific jargon. This particular tier found prevalent support among the more intellectually inclined officials of the Party, such as Hoess, “who professed to despise …the pornographic anti-‐Semitism propagated by Streicher.” During his Nuremberg interrogations following the Nazi surrender, he admitted to believing that his anti-‐Semitism was therefore “more rational…rather (his primary concern was in) the International world Jewish conspiracy… by which Jews secretly held the levers of power.”xxv These innovative forms of propaganda allowed the citizen to mindlessly digest the state hunger for persecution in his own mind, building often unarticulated and unquestioned justifications built out of unique prejudices and knowledge. This privatized movement was reinforced by the public speeches and rallies, which in turn was reinforced by the belief in propaganda. For example, the underlying stress of the uncertain political and economic development of Germany was expressed in propaganda as the stress caused by the Jewish presence.xxvi This expression of a “national misfortune” moved individual, private concerns of the citizen into the public forum, a space and opportunity for unifying citizen with fellow citizen. On occasion, these opportunities for unity were staged for dramatic effect, creating Stunden der Nation, (‘national moments’) in which the community as a whole paused in conscious participation of the Fuhrer expressing his presence.xxvii Propaganda in the Third Reich would not have achieved such staggering levels of success had it remained solely in the intellectualized frame of reference in the citizen’s life-‐world. In order for the citizen to even partially accept the barrage of information and instruction spelt out
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through various manifestations, a successful “hidden correspondence”xxviii had to transpire between the habitus of the state and the habitus of the citizen. This successful interaction would bring the citizen into the social space of the state, and the state into the social space of the citizen.xxix Artaud’s discussion on the stage and the audience in the theatre runs alongside the logic behind Nazi spatialization techniques: We abolish the stage and the auditorium and replace them by a single site, without partition or barrier of any kind, which will become the theatre of the action. A direct communication will be re-‐established between the spectator and the spectacle… from the fact that that the spectator, place din the middle of the action, is engulfed and physically affected by it.xxx
However, even as the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda was compelled to occasionally offer points of veracity in order to maintain a relationship of trust with the independent citizen and spectator, the messages put forth in the propaganda would have only remained a tangential element, a stage of irrelevant spectacles so to speak, in the citizen’s life if it could not eventually and smoothly be incorporated into a corporeal reality.xxxi This incorporation was the ultimate goal of Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, as illustrated in his 1933 speech to the managerial staff of German radio in the Haus des Rundfunks: “As the piano is to the pianist, so the transmitter is to you, the instrument you play on as sovereign masters of public opinion.”xxxii He later expanded his lectures on the task of managing public opinion, this time regarding the government’s responsibility to not merely “inform, but instruct” the press to adopt a “crusading” spirit which would reflect the spirit of the times, and in this way avoid a “daily war” with the press corps. The expression of anti-‐Semitism is evidenced through cinematic propaganda tools, such as the 1940 film, Der ewige Jude (The Wandering Jew) which illustrated the impermanence of the
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body and loyalty of the “wandering Jew.” The tacit state disapproval of this wandering was justified through his literal movements allegedly spreading plagues through Medieval Europe and continuing to defy the commitment to ongoing manual labor which had defined the existence and history of his settled counterparts.xxxiii Through an updated Reich Cinema Law drafted and released in 1934, films were judged by a new use of distinction marks, Pradikate, which had been originally introduced in the Weimar era. Although the Pradikate system under the Weimar Republic had been considered an covetous honor because of their accompanying tax reduction, in the Reich film industry, these marks were a troublesome but compulsory purchase for a film seeking to be released in the state. The Reich further expanded upon this system by dividing the distinctions into eleven categories which ranged from “culturally valuable” to “politically and artistically especially valuable”, the former category reserved for films produced by established directors or films created solely for exportation, with the latter maintained for Nazi youth organizations or school events.xxxiv The Nazi program of anti-‐Semitism focused on three major themes which were nebulous and malleable enough to fit into the three tiers which conformed to the three basic socio-‐ economic classes of Germany. The three views expounded on themes of Jewish support of exploitative capitalism, Jewish support of Marxist Socialism, and the Jewish struggle against Aryan interests both nationally and internationally.xxxv Nazi anti-‐Semitism focused on “struggles” between the races, which found expression in the various symbols of bellicosity and combat in not only propaganda, but in the German world view. War became not only a means to an end, rather it was celebration of the German spirit, a “life spirit” which was sanctified and validated by fallen soldiers. This “life spirit” led to a novel hero-‐ization movement of Germany in which the
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characteristics of deceased soldiers took on near immortal status and importance. This attitude was expressed not only in films and speeches, but in the everyday songs sung by soldiers:
…And even if heaven, hell, and the world Were to be allied against us, We would hold our heads high xxxvi And fight until the last man fell wounded…
This song illustrates the unbreakable commitment held by German soldiers on the front lines to unite and fight, even against a figurative heaven and the world; further, it was constantly validated by the nationalist feelings abound in the state. According to Hoess, “The Fuhrer lives! In boundless gratitude we all feed today as if he has been given to us anew. Providence has spare our Fuhrer in the past, and Providence will spare our Fuhrer in the future, because he has been sent on a great mission…”xxxvii This level of frenzied faith and expressed love for the Fuhrer and by extension, the German spirit, was termed Steigerungsmoglichkeit. The flames of these nationalist passions were constantly finding shape and form in the skills of Nazi propagandists and leaders, as seen in the May 1940 order from Goebbels to Hans Fritzche regarding German fear of French and British military reprisals, “Intensify the panic which is beginning to spread, and do everything possible to incite more unrest and to bring tensions to a peak.”xxxviii Such tensions of future judgment had far earlier affected those charged with the duty as executioner of homo sacer, directed the shooting, they began to repress as well as justify their activities… (which is) quite noticeable in the choice of language for reports of individual killing actions. .. employing terms that tended to either justify the killings or to obscure them altogether.xxxix As with all forms of effective propaganda, the Nazis always included the element of truth in their rabid canards, speeches, and films. Half of the Jewish population within the Reichstag had
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indeed voted against war credits.xl Further, the percentage of the Jewish population which enlisted for the army in WWI, was disproportionately low to their German population. To add to these alleged insults, Jews, historically loyal to governments, were visibly active to the interim government, hastily formed to surrender to the Allies.xli Furthermore, unlike other minorities, the German Jews were largely concentrated in urban settings. By 1933, more than 1/3 of the Jewish population was living in Berlin.xlii This level of visibility in cities exposed the Jewish population in a more extreme manner than if it had been leveled more evenly across the German state. Nazi propaganda also made use of the over-‐representation of Jews in the German employment pre-‐1933. Citing the 61% involved in labor force against the 18% ethnic Germans, the 2% of Jewish workers involved in manual labor, such as agriculture, versus the 29% ethnic Germans.xliii Further, Jews had attained their comparatively higher statuses in society because of their educational achievements. Once German universities had become to accept Jews in 1790, it was only 80 years before Jews were over-‐represented within academia, both as instructors and students. Between 1870-‐1933, Jews comprised 12% of lecturers, and between 1905-‐1931, 25% of students in grammar schools were likewise Jewish. Staring into the margins of the state apparatus, the average citizen could not wage war against such an overwhelming force which appealed to his mind and emotions, even if he was pre-‐disposed to such subversive action. “It is the ordinary citizen who is oppressed…the ordinary citizen is ill-‐equipped to do battle on a field of unpunctuated clauses and strewn with legal jargon. But what is worse is that if he wants to do battle it is only with great difficulty he can find anyone to do it with. The man behind the counter has not the slightest idea what is in the form, nor the man behind him, nor the man behind the managing director’s desk…”xliv
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How did political speeches influence the choices and developing acceptance of Nazism within society? Herbert claims that in the pre-‐Nazi era it was more from “indifference and readiness to accept the persecution of the Jews and to ignore it as ‘unimportant’ which characterized the attitude of ‘normal Germans’ in those years.”xlv This level of apathy towards individual rights, protection of minorities and belief in tolerance in society indicates a relatively weak civil society. This level of unseated civil society in Germany was demonstrated in a lack of protest towards authorities in November 1938 when over 20,000 Jewish males were incarcerated. As far as the heads of the Nazi state were concerned, “the murder of Jews would no longer involve legal repercussions…as long as one avoided public sensations, uproar…nothing was to be expected from the German population than indifference.”xlvi “A free mortal forecloses alternative possibilities when it chooses to do or become x; and every act of freedom is therefore bound up with the possibilities it must forgo.”xlvii Initials acts of anti-‐Semitic legislation were furthered in “bureaucratic momentum,” which required the adaption of civil servants to positions which handled matters related to Jewish policies which came to exist within their civic realms. Eventually, the allure of a career as a Judensachbearbeiter drew the attention of many disinterested with their tedious civil servant jobs. In the beliefs of Christopher Browning, it was in this arsenal of bureaucratic man-‐machines that the Nazi regime found professional legitimation.xlviii
Under Nazi logic and later under law within the regime, it followed that “the notion of race
functions (so it) does not refer to any situation of external fact but instead realizes an immediate coincidence of fact and law…a zone in which the distinction between life and politics, between questions of fact and question of law, has literally no more meaning.”xlix To create a retroactive
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genealogy, the Nazi Party called upon real and imagined historical “confrontations” of Judaism to German identity which could no longer be ignored, else the indistinct Jewish threat of domination would be realized by destroying Volkish ideology. The use of this genealogy was noted by Connolly as a means of drawing upon concepts “of intrinsic identity and otherness into question in order to tap agonistic care for difference from the experience of not being exhausted by the identities that fix a particular life… drawing on the… powers of imagination derived from it.”l Bourdieu adds to this illustration of confronting and resolving alterity by framing the reliance on a lingua franca as a “paradox (which) presupposes a common medium, but one which works… only by eliciting and reviving singular, and therefore, socially marked, experiences.li This view was not limited to politics, even in the musical world in the operas of Wagner, this anti-‐Semitism was expressed. In the composer’s mind, the Jews “could not share the Leidenschaften (passions) of the nation, had no claim on Volksgeist (national spirit). Jews were soulless wanderers hostile to European art and civilization.”lii Bringing Judaism into the realm of racial identity brought likewise the relationship of German to Jew into violence. As Hitler pronounced in an early speech outlining this new relationship, “Whoever wants to live must therefore fight and whoever does not wish to do battle in this world of eternal struggle does not deserve to live.”liii This call for violence and German assertion was proclaimed even by academics, such as Heinrich Treitschke, a professor at the University of Berlin at the time of Bismarck. He called upon the German state to first condemn the Jews as “our national misfortune” and then to recognize itself as an “organic entity embodying the aspirations of its people, it was born in violence and entitled to seize Lebensraum by any means.”liv Similarly, German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte expressed the stereotypical Jewish drive for conquest, “A mighty state
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stretches across almost all the countries of Europe, hostile in intent and engaged in constant strife with everyone else…this is Jewry.”lv IV.
Daily Communication
Discourse in the Nazi regime flowed in a vertical direction, originating from Party heads and propaganda ministers downwards to the lower Party members and citizens. The opportunity for communicative reciprocity was scarce between higher Party official and citizen and naturally non-‐existent from homo sacer to any in the state. Under the newer and reasoned anti-‐Semitism, however, the Nazis had to re-‐justify, re-‐explain and reiterate in multiple formal and informal exchanges the reason why the Jewish homo viator was unwelcome and unwanted in the new, glorious Reich. All these newer forms of anti-‐Semitic explanations were focused around academically and scientifically based reasoning. Necessarily, these purported academic reasons and explanations decreased in formalized logic and empirical study the further it moved from educated, top tiered Nazi society. Thus the necessity remained for older, more traditional forms of anti-‐Semitism based in emotion. Having already been established in the collective memory of citizens, these forms of prejudice called for no citation to further justify the new regime, nor explanation for their having been formed at all. In at least one respect, the newer forms of anti-‐Semitism were far more vile than the traditional resentment – by using Jewish texts and beliefs as a legitimized springboard for justification of Nazi anti-‐Semitic policies. When these actual sources fell short, Nazi scholars relied on distorted translations and even utterly falsified texts, such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
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Even in the realm of politics, a field ostensibly dominated by the Jew, this anti-‐Semitic vein was popularized. This attitude was exemplified in one lengthy speech in the Reichstag by a member of an anti-‐Semitic party: …and that every Jew who at this moment has not done anything bad may nevertheless under the proper conditions do precisely that, because his racial qualities drive him to do it… if it were a matter of fighting with honest weapons against an honest enemy; then it would be a matter of course that the Germans would not fear such a people. But the Jews, who operate like parasites, are a different kind of problem…the lvi Jews are cholera germs.
Due to the tension between a diminished of quickly emigrating Jewish population and the zealous drive by German jurists for legally enacted anti-‐Semitism, German Jews soon became over-‐represented in the Nazi court convictions in terms of racial policy defiance. In 1939, 12% of convicted passport offences were committed by Jews; likewise 62% convicted for “racial defilement” were from the dwindling Jewish population; and finally Jews were likewise over-‐ represented in a third legal situation, with 29% convicted of “foreign currency offenses.”lvii Through the decreasing numbers of Jews available to bodily defy or dispel stereotypes, it became simpler to preach anti-‐Semitism from the pulpit, classroom, and courtroom. In conclusion, through the conscious categorizing of these four methods of indoctrination and their occasional compilation for mass rallies and parades, the language of the Nazi state usurped the private lexicon and, by extension, the entire linguistic structure held by each citizen through a twofold arbitrary and deliberate substitution of previous definitions and implications in the common language.
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i
Jean-‐Jacques Rousseau, Emile, (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 83. Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 94. iii Donna Harraway, as quoted in The Female Body and The Law, Zillah Eisenstein. (Berkeley: University of California, 1989), 23. iv Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-‐Ginet, “Power: Gender Relations.” Annual Review of Anthology, Vol. 21 (1992), 474. v Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 136. vi Scarry, The Body in Pain, 33. vii Ibid. viii Ibid., 45-‐46. ix Gideon Hausner, Justice in Jerusalem, (Jerusalem: Herzl Press, 1978), 40. x Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, Trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, (New York: Hill & Wang, 1964), 31. xi George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 239. xii Allert Tilman, The Hitler Salute: On the Meaning of Gesture, (New York: Henry Holt & Company, Inc., 2008), 11. xiii Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 72. xiv Hugh Dalziel Duncan, Symbols in Society, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 23. xv Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, 108. xvi Scarry, The Body in Pain, 41. xvii Ibid., 41. xviii Ibid., 31. xix Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947), 61. xx Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, (London: Routledge, 2003), vii. xxi Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 31. xxii Jay Baird, The Mythical World of Nazi War Propaganda, 1939-‐1945, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1974), 3. ii
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xxiii
Ibid., 4. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 70. xxv Laurence Rees, Auschwitz, (New York: Perseus Books Group, 2005), 3. xxvi David Welch, The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda, (London: Routledge, 1993), 76. xxvii Ibid., 115. xxviii Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 41. xxix Ironically, despite historical horrors resulting from this porous relationship between State and citizen, public and private, this breakdown of border remains the steadfast goal of the progressive feminist car ethics project. xxx Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, 96. xxxi Welch, The Third Reich, 35. xxxii Ibid., 30. xxxiii Ibid., 78. xxxiv Ibid., 45. xxxv Sarah Ann Gordon, Hitler, Germans, and the ‘Jewish Question’, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984), 78. xxxvi Baird, The Mythical World of Nazi War Propaganda, 8. xxxvii Ibid., 66. xxxviii Ibid., 87. xxxix Raul Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews, vol. I, (New York: Holmes & Meir Publishers Ltd., 1985), 329. xl Gordon, Hitler, Germans, and the “Jewish Question”, 76. xli Ibid., 98. xlii Ibid., 87. xliii Ibid., 98. xliv Patrick Devlin, The Enforcement of Morals, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 49. xlv Ulrich Herbert, National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies, (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 23. xlvi Ibid., 24. xlvii William Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991/2002), 18. xlviii Christopher Browning, Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy September 1939-‐March 1942, (London: William Heinemann, 2004), 11. xlix Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 172. l Ibid., 182. li Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 39.[ lii Saul Friedman, A History of the Holocaust, (Oregon: Vallentine Mitchell, 2004), 45. liii Gordon, Hitler, Germans, and the ‘Jewish Question’, 87. liv Friedman, A History of the Holocaust, 39. lv Ibid., 38. lvi Ibid. lvii Nikolaus Wachsmann, Hitler’s Prisons: Legal Terror in Nazi Germany, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 159. xxiv
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