The Language

A philologist forbidden a library spent twelve years keeping notes on single words, and worked out that the speeches were never the instrument.

A course on the thought of Victor Klemperer.

Rhetoric

What you will learn

• Explain why monotony rather than suppression is Klemperer's account of what happened to German.
• State which registers of ordinary language the LTI dispensed with, and what that cost the person speaking it.
• Identify the ironic inverted comma and say what it asserts without arguing.
• Recognise the point at which a quantity stops being a count and becomes an adjective.
• Recognise the technical metaphor as a class, rather than as a set of individual ugly words.
• State the honest difficulty Klemperer raises about professional shorthand, and why he does not resolve it.
• Read a death notice's formula as a graded declaration, and say what each rung of the grading claims.
• Explain what it means that the strongest evidence in the book comes from writing nobody was ordered to produce.

Course outline

1. Poverty is the weapon — The obvious explanation for what happened to German is censorship. Klemperer's is stranger and worse: the language was not silenced, it was impoverished, and it lost the ability to do most of the…
2. The marks that argue for you — Two devices that never appear in a speech and never get quoted: a pair of inverted commas, and a number. Klemperer shows both doing the arguing that the sentences around them have stopped bothering…
3. Human material — A vocabulary borrowed from workshops and stores, applied to people. The module Klemperer is least certain about, because he cannot decide where the professional shorthand ends and the cynicism begins.
4. The form you fill in — The best chapter in the book, and the one nobody quotes. Klemperer read the death notices, which are the only prose a private family composes, pays for and prints — and found a scale of political…
5. None of them were Nazis — One shift at the factory where Klemperer did forced labour, and four people who were against the regime in every way that mattered to them — and who could not put a sentence together without it.
6. Putting the theory to the test — The book's last chapter is an experiment. Twelve years of notes taken in one city, and then the city burns and its author is thrown across Germany with nothing to do but listen.

Works read in this course

• LTI — Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist's Notebook — Klemperer's 1947 study of what the Third Reich did to German, assembled after the war from notes kept throughout it; thirty-six short chapters, each on one mechanism.
• I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years — The diary Klemperer kept from 1933 to 1945 at constant risk of a house search, and the material LTI was built from; entries headed 'LTI.' are the working notes.

Terms introduced

LTI, Sprachregelung, the ironic inverted comma, Menschenmaterial, Gefolgschaft, Terrorangriff, the language of the victor

Part of the Simposeum course library.