Agreed: post-war Germany is a miracle. But it is a very queer miracle. There is a superb frenzy of life on the surface; but at the heart, there is a queer stillness. Go there: look away for a moment from the marvel of the production lines; close your ears momentarily to the rush of the motors.
The thing that has gone dead is the German language. Open the daily papers, the magazines, the flood of popular and learned books pouring off the new printing presses; go to hear a new German play, listen to the language as it is spoken over the radio or in the Bundestag. It is no longer the language of Goethe, Heine, and Nietzsche. It is not even that of Thomas Mann. Something immensely destructive has happened to it. It makes noise. It even communicates, but it creates no sense of communion.
Languages are living organisms. Infinitely complex, but organisms nevertheless. They have in them a certain life-force, and certain powers of absorption and growth. But they can decay and they can die.
A language shows that it has in it the germ of dissolution in several ways. Actions of the mind that were once spontaneous become mechanical, frozen habits (dead metaphors, stock similes, slogans). Words grow longer and more ambiguous. Instead of style, there is rhetoric. Instead of precise common usage, there is jargon. Foreign roots and borrowings are no longer absorbed into the blood stream of the native tongue. They are merely swallowed and remain an alien intrusion. All these technical failures accumulate to the essential failure: the language no longer sharpens thought but blurs it. Instead of charging every expression with the greatest available energy and directness, it loosens and disperses the intensity of feeling. The language is no longer adventure (and a live language is the highest adventure of which the human brain is capable). In short, the language is no longer lived; it is merely spoken.
That condition can last for a very long time; observe how Latin remained in use long after the springs of life in Roman civilization had run dry. But where it has happened, something essential in a civilization will not recover. And it has happened in Germany. That is why there is at the center of the miracle of Germany’s material resurrection such a profound deadness of spirit, such an inescapable sense of triviality and dissimulation.
What brought death to the German language? That is a fascinating and complicated piece of history. It begins with the paradoxical fact that German was most alive before there was a unified German state. The poetic genius of Luther, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Heine, and in part that of Nietzsche, pre-dates the establishment of the German nation. The masters of German prose and poetry were men not caught up in the dynamism of Prussian-Germanic national consciousness as it developed after the foundation of modern Germany in 1870. They were, like Goethe, citizens of Europe, living in princely states too petty to solicit the emotions of nationalism. Or, like Heine and Nietzsche, they wrote from outside Germany. And this has remained true of the finest of German literature even in recent times. Kafka wrote in Prague, Rilke in Prague, Paris, and Duino.
The official language and literature of Bismarck’s Germany already had in them the elements of dissolution. It is the golden age of the militant historians, of the philologists and the incomprehensible metaphysicians. These mandarins of the new Prussian empire produced that fearful composite of grammatical ingenuity and humorlessness which made the word “Germanic” an equivalent for dead weight. Those who escaped the Prussianizing of the language were the mutineers and the exiles, like those Jews who founded a brilliant journalistic tradition, or Nietzsche, who wrote from abroad.
For to the academicism and ponderousness of German as it was written by the pillars of learning and society between 1870 and the First World War, the imperial regime added its own gifts of pomp and mystification. The “Potsdam style” practiced in the chancelleries and bureaucracy of the new empire was a mixture of grossness (“the honest speech of soldiers”) and high flights of romantic grandeur (the Wagnerian note). Thus university, officialdom, army, and court combined to drill into the German language habits no less dangerous than those they drilled into the German people: a terrible weakness for slogans and pompous clichés (Lebensraum, “the yellow peril,” “the Nordic virtues”); an automatic reverence before the long word or the loud voice; a fatal taste for saccharine pathos (Gemütlichkeit) beneath which to conceal any amount of rawness or deception. In this drill, the justly renowned school of German philology played a curious and complex role. Philology places words in a context of older or related words, not in that of moral purpose and conduct. It gives to language formality, not form. It cannot be a mere accident that the essentially philological structure of German education yielded such loyal servants to Prussia and the Nazi Reich. The finest record of how the drill call of the classroom led to that of the barracks is contained in the novels of Heinrich Mann, particularly in Der Untertan.
When the soldiers marched off to the 1914 war, so did the words. The surviving soldiers came back, four years later, harrowed and beaten. In a real sense, the words did not. They remained at the front and built between the German mind and the facts a wall of myth. They launched the first of those big lies on which so much of modern Germany has been nurtured: the lie of “the stab in the back.” The heroic German armies had not been defeated; they had been stabbed in the back by “traitors, degenerates, and Bolsheviks.” The Treaty of Versailles was not an awkward attempt by a ravaged Europe to pick up some of the pieces but a scheme of cruel vengeance imposed on Germany by its greedy foes. The responsibility for unleashing war lay with Russia or Austria or the colonial machinations of “perfidious England,” not with Prussian Germany.
There were many Germans who knew that these were myths and who knew something of the part that German militarism and race arrogance had played in bringing on the holocaust. They said so in the political cabarets of the 1920s, in the experimental theater of Brecht, in the writings of the Mann brothers, in the graphic art of Käthe Kollwitz and George Grosz. The German language leapt to life as it had not done since the Junkers and the philologists had taken command of it. It was a brilliant, mutinous period. Brecht gave back to German prose its Lutheran simplicity and Thomas Mann brought into his style the supple, luminous elegance of the classic and Mediterranean tradition. These years, 1920–1930, were the anni mirabiles of the modern German spirit. Rilke composed the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus in 1922, giving to German verse a wing-stroke and music it had not known since Hölderlin. The Magic Mountain appeared in 1924, Kafka’s Castle in 1926. The Three-Penny Opera had its premiere in 1928, and in 1930 the German cinema produced The Blue Angel. The same year appeared the first volume of Robert Musil’s strange and vast meditation on the decline of Western values, The Man Without Qualities. During this glorious decade, German literature and art shared in that great surge of the Western imagination which encompassed Faulkner, Hemingway, Joyce, Eliot, Proust, D. H. Lawrence, Picasso, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky.
But it was a brief noontime. The obscurantism and hatreds built into the German temper since 1870 were too deep-rooted. In an uncannily prophetic “Letter from Germany,” Lawrence noted how “the old, bristling, savage spirit has set in.” He saw the country turning away “from contact with western Europe, ebbing to the deserts of the east.” Brecht, Kafka, and Thomas Mann did not succeed in mastering their own culture, in imposing on it the humane sobriety of their talent. They found themselves first the eccentrics, then the hunted. New linguists were at hand to make of the German language a political weapon more total and effective than any history had known, and to degrade the dignity of human speech to the level of baying wolves.
For let us keep one fact clearly in mind: the German language was not innocent of the horrors of Nazism. It is not merely that a Hitler, a Goebbles, and a Himmler happened to speak German. Nazism found in the language precisely what it needed to give voice to its savagery. Hitler heard inside his native tongue the latent hysteria, the confusion, the quality of hypnotic trance. He plunged unerringly into the undergrowth of language, into those zones of darkness and outcry which are the infancy of articulate speech, and which come before words have grown mellow and provisional to the touch of the mind. He sensed in German another music than that of Goethe, Heine, and Mann; a rasping cadence, half nebulous jargon, half obscenity. And instead of turning away in nauseated disbelief, the German people gave massive echo to the man’s bellowing. It bellowed back out of a million throats and smashed-down boots. A Hitler would have found reservoirs of venom and moral illiteracy in any language. But by virtue of recent history, they were nowhere else so ready and so near the very surface of common speech. A language in which one can write a “Horst Wessel Lied” is ready to give hell a native tongue. (How should the word “spritzen” recover a sane meaning after having signified to millions the “spurting” of Jewish blood from knife points?)
And that is what happened under the Reich. Not silence or evasion, but an immense outpouring of precise, serviceable words. It was one of the peculiar horrors of the Nazi era that all that happened was recorded, catalogued, chronicled, set down; that words were committed to saying things no human mouth should ever have said and no paper made by man should ever have been inscribed with. It is nauseating and nearly unbearable to recall what was done and spoken, but one must. In the Gestapo cellars, stenographers (usually women) took down carefully the noises of fear and agony wrenched, burned, or beaten out of the human voice. The tortures and experiments carried out on live beings at Belsen and Matthausen were exactly recorded. The regulations governing the number of blows to be meted out on the flogging blocks at Dachau were set down in writing. When Polish rabbis were compelled to shovel out open latrines with their hands and mouths, there were German officers there to record the fact, to photograph it, and to label the photographs. When the SS elite guards separated mothers from children at the entrance to the death camps, they did not proceed in silence. They proclaimed the imminent horrors in loud jeers: “Heida, heida, juchheisassa, Scheissjuden in den Schornstetn!”
The unspeakable being said, over and over, for twelve years. The unthinkable being written down, indexed, filed for reference. The men who poured quicklime down the openings of the sewers in Warsaw to kill the living and stifle the stink of the dead wrote home about it. They spoke of having to “liquidate vermin.” In letters asking for family snapshots or sending season’s greetings. Silent night, holy night, Gemütlichkeit. A language being used to run hell, getting the habits of hell into its syntax. Being used to destroy what there is in man of man and to restore to governance what there is of beast. Gradually, words lost their original meaning and acquired nightmarish definitions. Jude, Pole, Russe came to mean two-legged lice, putrid vermin which good Aryans must squash, as a party manual said, “like roaches on a dirty wall.” “Final solution,” endgültige Lösung, came to signify the death of six million human beings in gas ovens.
The language was infected not only with these great bestialities. It was called upon to enforce innumerable falsehoods, to persuade the Germans that the war was just and everywhere victorious. As defeat began closing in on the thousand-year Reich, the lies thickened to a constant snowdrift. The language was turned upside down to say “light” where there was blackness and “victory” where there was disaster. Gottfried Benn, one of the few decent writers to stay inside Nazi Germany, noted some of the new definitions from the dictionary of Hitler German:
In December 1943, that is to say at a time when the Russians had driven us before them for 1,500 kilometers, and had pierced our front in a dozen places, a first lieutenant, small as a hummingbird and gentle as a puppy, remarked: “The main thing is that the swine are not breaking through.” “Break through,” “roll back,” “clean up,” “flexible, fluid lines of combat”—what positive and negative power such words have; they can bluff or they can conceal. Stalingrad—tragic accident. The defeat of the U-boats—a small, accidental technical discovery by the British. Montgomery chasing Rommel 4,000 kilometers from El Alamein to Naples—treason of the Badoglio clique.
And as the circle of vengeance closed in on Germany, this snowdrift of lies thickened to a frantic blizzard. Over the radio, between the interruptions caused by air-raid warnings, Goebbels’ voice assured the German people that “titanic secret weapons” were about to be launched. On one of the very last days of Götterdämmerung, Hitler came out of his bunker to inspect a row of ashen-faced fifteen-year-old boys recruited for a last-ditch defense of Berlin. The order of the day spoke of “volunteers” and elite units gathered invincibly around the Führer. The nightmare fizzled out on a shameless lie. The Herrenvolk was solemnly told that Hitler was in the front-line trenches, defending the heart of his capital against the Red beasts. Actually, the buffoon lay dead with his mistress, deep in the safety of his concrete lair.
Languages have great reserves of life. They can absorb masses of hysteria, illiteracy, and cheapness (George Orwell showed how English is doing so today). But there comes a breaking point. Use a language to conceive, organize, and justify Belsen; use it to make out specifications for gas ovens; use it to dehumanize man during twelve years of calculated bestiality. Something will happen to it. Make of words what Hitler and Goebbels and the hundred thousand Untersturmführer made: conveyors of terror and falsehood. Something will happen to the words. Something of the lies and sadism will settle in the marrow of the language. Imperceptibly at first, like the poisons of radiation sifting silently into the bone. But the cancer will begin, and the deep-set destruction. The language will no longer grow and freshen. It will no longer perform, quite as well as it used to, its two principal functions: the conveyance of humane order which we call law, and the communication of the quick of the human spirit which we call grace. In an anguished note in his diary for 1940, Klaus Mann observed that he could no longer read new German books: “Can it be that Hitler has polluted the language of Nietzsche and Hölderlin?” It can.
But what happened to those who are the guardians of a language, the keepers of its conscience? What happened to the German writers? A number were killed in the concentration camps; others, such as Walter Benjamin, killed themselves before the Gestapo could get at them to obliterate what little there is in a man of God’s image. But the major writers went into exile. The best playwrights: Brecht and Zuckmayer. The most important novelists: Thomas Mann, Werfel, Feuchtwanger, Heinrich Mann, Stefan Zweig, Hermann Broch.
This exodus is of the first importance if we are to understand what has happened to the German language and to the soul of which it is the voice. Some of these writers fled for their lives, being Jews or Marxists or otherwise “undesirable vermin.” But many could have stayed as honored Aryan guests of the régime. The Nazis were only too anxious to secure the luster of Thomas Mann’s presence and the prestige that mere presence would have given to the cultural life of the Reich. But Mann would not stay. And the reason was that he knew exactly what was being done to the German language and that he felt that only in exile might that language be kept from final ruin. When he emigrated, the sycophantic academics of the University of Bonn deprived him of his honorary doctorate. In his famous open letter to the dean, Mann explained how a man using German to communicate truth or humane values could not remain in Hitler’s Reich:
The mystery of language is a great one; the responsibility for a language and for its purity is of a symbolic and spiritual kind; this responsibility does not have merely an aesthetic sense. The responsibility for language is, in essence, human responsibility.… Should a German writer, made responsible through his habitual use of language, remain silent, quite silent, in the face of all the irreparable evil which has been committed daily, and is being committed in my country, against body, soul and spirit, against justice and truth, against men and man?
Mann was right, of course. But the cost of such integrity is immense for a writer.
The German writers suffered different degrees of deprivation and reacted in different ways. A very few were fortunate enough to find asylum in Switzerland, where they could remain inside the living stream of their own tongue. Others, like Werfel, Feuchtwanger, and Heinrich Mann, settled near each other to form islands of native speech in their new homeland. Stefan Zweig, safely arrived in Latin America, tried to resume his craft. But despair overcame him. He was convinced that the Nazis would turn German into inhuman gibberish. He saw no future for a man dedicated to the integrity of German letters and killed himself. Others stopped writing altogether. Only the very tough or most richly gifted were able to transform their cruel condition into art.
Pursued by the Nazis from refuge to refuge, Brecht made of each of his new plays a brilliant rear-guard action. Mother Courage was first produced in Zurich in the dark spring of 1941. The further he was hounded, the clearer and stronger became Brecht’s German. The language seemed to be that of a primer spelling out the ABC of truth. Doubtless, Brecht was helped by his politics. Being a Marxist, he felt himself a citizen of a community larger than Germany and a participant in the forward march of history. He was prepared to accept the desecration and ruin of the German heritage as a necessary tragic prelude to the foundation of a new society. In his tract “Five Difficulties Encountered When Writing the Truth,” Brecht envisioned a new German language, capable of matching the word to the fact and the fact to the dignity of man.
Another writer who made of exile an enrichment was Hermann Broch. The Death of Virgil is not only one of the most important novels European literature has produced since Joyce and Proust; it is a specific treatment of the tragic condition of a man of words in an age of brute power. The novel turns on Virgil’s decision, at the hour of his death, to destroy the manuscript of the Aeneid. He now realizes that the beauty and truth of language are inadequate to cope with human suffering and the advance of barbarism. Man must find a poetry more immediate and helpful to man than that of words: a poetry of action. Broch, moreover, carried grammar and speech beyond their traditional confines, as if these had become too small to contain the weight of grief and insight forced upon a writer by the inhumanity of our times. Toward the close of his rather solitary life (he died in New Haven, nearly unknown), he felt increasingly that communication might lie in modes other than language, perhaps in mathematics, that other face of silence.
Of all the exiles, Thomas Mann fared best. He had always been a citizen of the world, receptive to the genius of other languages and cultures. In the last part of the Joseph cycle, there seemed to enter into Mann’s style certain tonalities of English, the language in the midst of which he was now living. The German remains that of the master, but now and again an alien light shines through it. In Doctor Faustus, Mann addressed himself directly to the ruin of the German spirit. The novel is shaped by the contrast between the language of the narrator and the events which he recounts. The language is that of a classical humanist, a touch laborious and old-fashioned, but always open to the voices of reason, skepticism, and tolerance. The story of Leverkühn’s life, on the other hand, is a parable of unreason and disaster. Leverkühn’s personal tragedy prefigures the greater madness of the German people. Even as the narrator sets down his pedantic but humane testimony to the wild destruction of a man of genius, the Reich is shown plunging to bloody chaos. In Doctor Faustus there is also a direct consideration of the roles of language and music in the German soul. Mann seems to be saying that the deepest energies of the German soul were always expressed in music rather than in words. And the history of Adrian Leverkühn suggests that this is a fact fraught with danger. For there are in music possibilities of complete irrationalism and hypnosis. Unaccustomed to finding in language any ultimate standard of meaning, the Germans were ready for the sub-human jargon of Nazism. And behind the jargon sounded the great dark chords of Wagnerian ecstasy. In The Holy Sinner, one of his last works, Mann returned to the problem of the German language by way of parody and pastiche. The tale is written in elaborate imitation of medieval German, as if to remove it as far as possible from the German of the present.
But for all their accomplishment, the German writers in exile could not safeguard their heritage from self-destruction. By leaving Germany, they could protect their own integrity. They witnessed the beginnings of the catastrophe, not its full unfolding. As one who stayed behind wrote: “You did not pay with the price of your own dignity. How, then, can you communicate with those who did?” The books that Mann, Hesse, and Broch wrote in Switzerland or California or Princeton are read in Germany today, but mainly as valuable proof that a privileged world had lived on “somewhere else,” outside Hitler’s reach.
What, then, of those writers who did stay behind? Some became lackeys in the official whorehouse of “Aryan culture,” the Reichsschrifttumskammer. Others equivocated till they had lost the faculty of saying anything clear or meaningful even to themselves. Klaus Mann gives a brief sketch of how Gerhart Hauptmann, the old lion of realism, came to terms with the new realities:
“Hitler … after all,… My dear friends!… no hard feelings!… Let’s try to be … No, if you please, allow me … objective … May I refill my glass? This champagne … very remarkable, indeed—the man Hitler, I mean … The champagne too, for that matter … Most extraordinary development … German youth … About seven million votes … As I often said to my Jewish friends … Those Germans … incalculable nation … very mysterious indeed … cosmic impulses … Goethe … Nibelungen Saga … Hitler, in a sense, expresses … As I tried to explain to my Jewish friends … dynamic tendencies … elementary, irresistible.…”
Some, like Gottfried Benn and Ernst Jünger, took refuge in what Benn called “the aristocratic form of emigration.” They entered the German Army, thinking they might escape the tide of pollution and serve their country in the “old, honorable ways” of the officer corps. Jünger wrote an account of the victorious campaign in France. It is a lyric, elegant little book, entitled Gärten und Strassen. Not a rude note in it. An old-style officer taking fatherly care of his French prisoners and entertaining “correct” and even gracious relations with his new subjects. Behind his staff car come the trucks of the Gestapo and the elite guards fresh from Warsaw. Jünger does not mention any such unpleasantness. He writes of gardens.
Benn saw more clearly, and withdrew first into obscurity of style, then into silence. But the sheer fact of his presence in Nazi Germany seemed to destroy his hold on reality. After the war, he set down some of his recollections of the time of night. Among them, we find an incredible sentence. Speaking of pressures put on him by the régime, Benn says: “I describe the foregoing not out of resentment against National Socialism. The latter is now overthrown, and I am not one to drag Hector’s body in the dust.” One’s imagination dizzies at the amount of confusion it must have taken to make a decent writer write that. Using an old academic cliché, he makes Nazism the equivalent of the noblest of Homeric heroes. Being dead, the language turns to lies.
A handful of writers stayed in Germany to wage a covert resistance. One of these very few was Ernst Wiechert. He spent some time in Buchenwald and remained in partial seclusion throughout the war. What he wrote he buried in his garden. He stayed on in constant peril, for he felt that Germany should not be allowed to perish in voiceless suffering. He remained so that an honest man should record for those who had fled and for those who might survive what it had been like. In The Forest of the Dead he gave a brief, tranquil account of what he saw in the concentration camp. Tranquil, because he wished the horror of the facts to cry out in the nakedness of truth. He saw Jews being tortured to death under vast loads of stone or wood (they were flogged each time they stopped to breathe until they fell dead). When Wiechert’s arm developed running sores, he was given a bandage and survived. The camp medical officer would not touch Jews or Gypsies even with his glove “lest the odor of their flesh infect him.” So they died, screaming with gangrene or hunted by the police dogs. Wiechert saw and remembered. At the end of the war he dug the manuscript out of his garden, and in 1948 published it. But it was already too late.
In the three years immediately following the end of the war, many Germans tried to arrive at a realistic insight into the events of the Hitler era. Under the shadow of the ruins and of economic misery, they considered the monstrous evil Nazism had loosed on them and on the world. Long rows of men and women filed past the bone heaps in the death camps. Returned soldiers admitted to something of what the occupation of Norway or Poland or France or Yugoslavia had been like—the mass shootings of hostages, the torture, the looting. The churches raised their voice. It was a period of moral scrutiny and grief. Words were spoken that had not been pronounced in twelve years. But the moment of truth was rather short.
The turning point seems to have come in 1948. With the establishment of the new Deutschmark, Germany began a miraculous ascent to renewed economic power. The country literally drugged itself with hard work. Those were the years in which men spent half the night in their rebuilt factories because their homes were not yet viable. And with this upward leap of material energy came a new myth. Millions of Germans began saying to themselves and to any foreigner gullible enough to listen that the past had somehow not happened, that the horrors had been grossly exaggerated by Allied propaganda and sensation-mongering journalists. Yes, there were some concentration camps, and reportedly a number of Jews and other unfortunates were exterminated. “But not six million, lieber Freund, nowhere near that many. That’s just propaganda, you know.” Doubtless, there had been some regrettable brutalities carried out on foreign territory by units of the S.S. and S.A. “But those fellows were Lumpenhunde, lower-class ruffians. The regular army did nothing of the kind. Not our honorable German Army. And, really, on the Eastern Front our boys were not up against normal human beings. The Russians are mad dogs, lieber Freund, mad dogs! And what of the bombing of Dresden?” Wherever one traveled in Germany, one heard such arguments. The Germans themselves began believing them with fervor. But there was worse to come.
Germans in every walk of life began declaring that they had not known about the atrocities of the Nazi régime. “We did not know what was going on. No one told us about Dachau, Belsen, or Auschwitz. How should we have found out? Don’t blame us.” It is obviously difficult to disprove such a claim to ignorance. There were numerous Germans who had only a dim notion of what might be happening outside their own backyard. Rural districts and the smaller, more remote communities were made aware of reality only in the last months of the war, when battle actually drew near them. But an immense number did know. Wiechert describes his long journey to Buchenwald in the comparatively idyllic days of 1938. He tells how crowds gathered at various stops to jeer and spit at the Jews and political prisoners chained inside the Gestapo van. When the death trains started rolling across Germany during the war, the air grew thick with the sound and stench of agony. The trains waited on sidings at Munich before heading for Dachau, a short distance away. Inside the sealed cars, men, women, and children were going mad with fear and thirst. They screamed for air and water. They screamed all night. People in Munich heard them and told others. On the way to Belsen, a train was halted somewhere in southern Germany. The prisoners were made to run up and down the platform and a Gestapo man loosed his dog on them with the cry: “Man, get those dogs!” A crowd of Germans stood by watching the sport. Countless such cases are on record.
Most Germans probably did not know the actual details of liquidation. They may not have known about the mechanics of the gas ovens (one official Nazi historian called them “the anus of the world”). But when the house next door was emptied overnight of its tenants, or when Jews, with their yellow star sewn on their coats, were barred from the air-raid shelters and made to cower in the open, burning streets, only a blind cretin could not have known.
Yet the myth did its work. True, German audiences were moved not long ago by the dramatization of The Diary of Anne Frank. But even the terror of the Diary has been an exceptional reminder. And it does not show what happened to Anne inside the camp. There is little market for such things in Germany. Forget the past. Work. Get prosperous. The new Germany belongs to the future. When recently asked what the name Hitler meant to them, a large number of Gerrnan schoolchildren replied that he was a man who had built the Autobahnen and had done away with unemployment. Had they heard that he was a bad man? Yes, but they did not really know why. Teachers who tried to tell them about the history of the Nazi period had been told from official quarters that such matters were not suitable for children. Some few who persisted had been removed or put under strong pressure by parents and colleagues. Why rake up the past?
Here and there, in fact, the old faces are back. On the court benches sit some of the judges who meted out Hitler’s blood laws. On many professorial chairs sit scholars who were first promoted when their Jewish or Socialist teachers had been done to death. In a number of German and Austrian universities, the bullies swagger again with their caps, ribbons, dueling scars, and “pure Germanic” ideals. “Let us forget” is the litany of the new German age. Even those who cannot, urge others to do so. One of the very few pieces of high literature to concern itself with the full horror of the past is Albrecht Goes’s The Burnt Offering. Told by a Gestapo official that there will be no time to have her baby where she is going, a Jewish woman leaves her baby carriage to a decent Aryan shopkeeper’s wife. The next day she is deported to the ovens. The empty carriage brings home to the narrator the full sum of what is being committed. She resolves to give up her own life as a burnt offering to God. It is a superb story. But at the outset, Goes hesitates whether it should be told: “One has forgotten. And there must be forgetting, for how could a man live who had not forgotten?” Better, perhaps.
Everything forgets. But not a language. When it has been injected with falsehood, only the most drastic truth can cleanse it. Instead, the post-war history of the German language has been one of dissimulation and deliberate forgetting. The remembrance of horrors past has been largely uprooted. But at a high cost. And German literature is paying it right now. There are gifted younger writers and a number of minor poets of some distinction. But the major part of what is published as serious literature is flat and shoddy. It has in it no flame of life.* Compare the best of current journalism with an average number of the Frankfurter Zeitung of pre-Hitler days; it is at times difficult to believe that both are written in German.
This does not mean that the German genius is mute. There is a brilliant musical life, and nowhere is modern experimental music assured of a fairer hearing. There is, once again, a surge of activity in mathematics and the natural sciences. But music and mathematics are “languages” other than language. Purer, perhaps; less sullied with past implications; abler, possibly, to deal with the new age of automation and electronic control. But not language. And so far, in history, it is language that has been the vessel of human grace and the prime carrier of civilization.
[Understandably, this essay, written in 1959, caused much hurt and anger. Discussion and misquotation of it have continued in Germany to the present time. The journal Sprache im technischen Zeitalter devoted a special number to the debate, and controversy arose anew at the meeting in the United States in the spring of 1966 of the German writers known as the Gruppe 47. The academic profession, to which I somewhat uneasily belong, took a particularly adverse view of the case.
If I republish “The Hollow Miracle” in this book, it is because I believe that the matter of the relations between language and political inhumanity is a crucial one; and because I believe that it can be seen with specific and tragic urgency in respect of the uses of German in the Nazi period and in the acrobatics of oblivion which followed on the fall of Nazism. De Maistre and George Orwell have written of the politics of language, of how the word may lose its humane meanings under the pressure of political bestiality and falsehood. We have scarcely begun, as yet, to apply their insights to the actual history of language and feeling. Here almost everything remains to be done.
I republish this essay also because I believe that its general line of argument is valid. When I wrote it, I did not know of Victor Klemperer’s remarkable book Aus dent Notizbuch eines Philologen, published in East Berlin in 1946 (now reissued by Joseph Melzer Verlag, Darmstadt, under the title Die unbewältigte Sprache). In far more detail than I was able to give, Klemperer, a trained linguist, traces the collapse of German into Nazi jargon and the linguistic-historical background to that collapse. In 1957, there appeared a small, preliminary lexicon of Nazi German: Aus dem Wörterbuch des Unmenschen, compiled by Sternberger, Storz, and Süskind. In 1964, suggestions I had made for more detailed study were taken up in Cornelia Berning’s Vom “Abstammungsnachweis” zum “Zuchtuiart.” Dolf Sternberger has come back to the whole question in his essay on “Mass/stäbe der Sprachkritik” in Kriterien (Frankfurt, 1965). In Hochhuth’s The Deputy, particularly in the scenes involving Eichmann and his business cronies, Nazi German is given precise, nauseating expression. The same is true in Peter Weiss’s Investigation and, as I try to show in the “Note on Günter Grass” which follows this essay, in Hundejahre.
In these past ten years, moreover, a new chapter has begun in the complex history of the German language and of its articulations of political reality. East German is once again developing much of that grammar of lies, of totalitarian simplifications, which was brought to such a high degree of efficiency in the Nazi era. Walls can be built between two halves of a city, but also between words and humane content.]
[* This statement was valid in 1959; not today. It is precisely by turning to face the past that German drama and fiction have resumed a violent, often journalistic, but undeniable force of life.]