Dennis Myers conceived of this essay on/adaption of Victor Klemperer’s work last year. Myers and your editor chose to hold off posting it until this year’s Republican Convention.
History may not repeat, but history’s screams certainly echo. And Victor Klemperer screams at us now across the decades from his 1957 The Language of the Third Reich essays. (All page citations are from the 2013 Bloomsburg Revelations edition.) He survived the war only through the grace of his marriage to a pure-non-Jew. He survived the psychological horror, in part, by focusing his philologist skills on the devil tongue of Nazism. If you take his screams, his echoes, his insights on the Reich’s rhetorical strategies, if you take Prof. K’s own statements and replace the words Nazi or Hitler or Reich with a blank for noun, the easily completed thought results in a timely 2020 essay.
Mad Libs? You gotta remember Mad Libs, every linguists favorite party game. You take a perfectly good paragraph, take out some nouns, adjectives, verbs (and occasionally an adverb) and leave blanks that the crowd calls out random words to complete the sentences with often riotously funny results. (You can buy the presidents MadLib here.)
Mad Libs? Maybe this is more like Madness Libs, because it ain’t no children’s game. No, this fascist language is serious; as Prof. K illustrates, “this is the language which writes and thinks for you.” (27) The exaggerations boasted beyond belief; the swollen fantasy appeals to an idealized, fictional past; the pastoral ideation opposed to and honored above the grit of our bombed out city landscapes; the drawing of ranks and identity to an ill-defined national soul; even the addictive use of sports metaphors (think Trump’s “winning, winning like never before”)—all this wrapped around the native tongue to create the destructive reality for the Volk. An unquestioned, all consuming, most natural, completely undeniable reality that has already done the hard lift of thinking for you. Or, as a listener to Medal of Freedom hero Rush Limbaugh’s sermons might put it, “Ditto.”
So, courtesy of the past, let’s have fun. Don’t MadLibs always provoke party laughter? Remember, this whole situation began with a shrug and a hysterical laugh. Candidate Trump’s surreal golden escalator descent announcing his campaign centered on preventing Mexican rapists from entering the country, all played to a paid crowd that included “good” Mexicans. We all (all?) laughed at the absurdity. Well, back in ’33, as the madness materialized under the proud German high-culture, Prof. K found humorous comfort in a neighbor comparing wearing a swastika armband to carrying a sanitary napkin: essential, but uncomfortable. “Am I deceiving myself if I derive some hope from all [these jokes]? This total madness cannot be sustained once the people’s intoxication has worn off, once the hangover has begun.” (33) Oh, we are still in the drink of a total head-shaking madness, like “[s]ome kind of fog [that has] descended which [was] enveloping everybody.” (38)
As we now look towards Trump’s potential re-election, we may repeat, “how did we get here?” Ten years into fascism, Prof. K voiced similar wonder: “Continually and from all directions I am assailed by the same nagging doubt: how much can be said with certainty about the knowledge and thinking of a nation, about its intellectual and spiritual health?” (51) Should we too be surprised when White House civics draws more from inclination than education, where we the people develop our understanding of the Constitution from schools that teach history as a series of dates and not drama, as figures and not lives…and even those trivial attempts stop before the depths of high school? Ah, but certainly this gap was certainly rectified in 2011 when House members read the sacred, unchangeable document from the House floor?
This year the fading glory of the still present Trump 2016 signs that mushroomed many an American lawn are being replaced with the hope not of making the country great, but with the claim to an even greater romantic ideal of keeping it great. Keep hope alive with MAGA and KAG: we have our own great American Romanticism. Fascist language, for our Prof. K, shrouds itself in the mists of romanticism. “Romanticism, not only of the kitschy kind, but also the real one, dominates the period, and the innocent and the mixers of poison, the victims and the henchmen, both draw on this same source.” (220) Keep America Great is the call “not to be skeptical, not to be soberly liberal, not to be weak-willed like the previous era; the aim is not to let things dominate you, but to dominate; one wants to act, and never let go of ‘the injunction to act.’” (232) Today’s three word chants and glib evasions…think “alternative facts” or America’s mayor’s “truth isn’t truth” assertion…evoke the “whole emotional mendacity of [mad lib here ], the whole mortal sin of deliberately twisting things founded on reason into the realm of the emotions, and deliberate distortion for the sake of sentimental mystifications.” (244)
For sentimental mystifications on the grand scale of pageantry, the Nazis of Nuremberg…none did it better. After all, they had Leni Riefenstahl in their arsenal. We only have [mad lib here]. “The ceremonially decorated marketplace in which the crowd is addressed, or the hall or arena, adorned with standards and banners, can, to some extent, be seen as an integral part of the speech itself, as its body; the speech is embedded and stage-managed in a frame of this kind, it is a total work of art simultaneously addressing itself to the ears and the eyes, the ears indeed twice over, since the roaring of the crowd, its applause and its disapproval have at least as powerful effect on the individual member of the audience as the speech itself. (53)”
But oh, that democracy rag plays out in our Homeland political crusades, our own sweet ode of venom. While Nazi Germany is rightfully infamous for its spectacular rallies, American political campaigns across the entire spectrum have relished in the banner, the bunting, and the bully pulpit. Yet, it takes a master of the rhetorical formation of hysteria to bring the spectacle to its “perfect” pinnacle.
Witness a Trump rally then, where the rambling rhythms of his rhetoric whip public passions and humiliate the announced enemies. In the president’s off-the-cuff undulations…jokingly characterized by the left as incoherent incoherencies (when we unfortunately forget that Trump need not be rational enough or intelligible enough in order to be effective)…his language deeply parallels historical performers. “Hitler [speaks with]…the unctuousness or the sarcasm…the two tones…he always liked to alternate.” (55) “Composure and musicality were never heard in his voice.” (55) Hitler “even when triumphant was insecure and would shout down opponents and opposing ideas.” His speeches “entailed little more than a progression from malicious agitator to agitated quarry, from convulsive condemnation through rage and impotent rage to despair.” (55) Indeed, “there can’t be a single speech of the Fuhrer that doesn’t long-windedly list Germany’s successes and sarcastically insult the enemy.” (228)
Is it really deranged to compare these two figures, these two who have so much to brag about? On September 25, 2018, Donald J.Trump stood before the United Nations General Assembly and announced, casually, proudly…“In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country. So true.” (His boast was met with spontaneous laughter from the world, where terror might have been more appropriate.) Trump regularly parades his grandiose list of ‘accomplishments,’ as he not only far outreaches his Democratic predecessors, but exceeds perhaps all leaders of all time. (After all, Trump has boasted that if “honest Abe Lincoln were here, [he] could give him one hell of an introduction.”)
Problems? Blame Obama. It’s a historical pattern that Prof. K notes [mad lib here]’s persistent boasting. The Nazis “condemned [the Weimar Republic] for the paralyzing effect of the splintering of the political parties.” (102) After Hitler’s first farcical parliamentary session, “the Party newspapers reported triumphantly that the new [government] had achieve more in half an hour than the old [government] in six months.” (102)
Perhaps it’s laughable to recall that our own Presidential exaggerations started, officially, day 1, with accounts of the inaugural crowd size (“largest ever”) and the lack of rain. (I stood in the rain watching this whole thing unfold: it did rain, floodwaters in my imagination, but actually only a drizzle.) Germany is not alone when it comes to the curse of superlatives, as Prof. K notes the American inclination (in a wink wink style) to push the extreme, particularly “a certain straightforward naivety in the exaggerated figures of American adverts.” (222) But is this still naivety when involved in the selling of a president? Imagine now Sean Michael Spicer standing at a different podium, one dressed in red and black bunting. “The bulletins of the Third Reich…start off in a superlative mode from the very outset and then, the worse the situation, the more they overdo it, until everything becomes literally measureless, twisting the fundamental quality of … language, its disciplined exactitude, into its very opposite, into fantasy and fairy-tale. “ (223) Laughable…if not so past and future perfect.
Yet who can deny Trump his proclaimed ‘accomplishments?’ “[The] spoken language expressed by mere adoption of a sarcastic tone, the ironic inverted comma [‘ ‘] is closely allied to the rhetorical character of the [Third Reich].” (76) Oh, stop that, Prof. K. Your philologist spectacles have peered too far into absurdist academia here, complaining about Nazi punctuation. We ‘all’ use air quotes these days. There is ‘nothing wrong’ with saying something and not meaning it at the same time. Confusion isn’t Nazi propaganda: it’s just Trump being Trump. The man speaks his ‘mind,’ even when he says things that he doesn’t ‘mean’.
The fact that witches haunt the current administration and that devils walk amongst us is a real and legitimate concern. The devils in Prof. K’s Germany, were, of course, the Jews. But prior to the National Socialist rise, many a Jew considered him and herself a German (as did Prof. K throughout), oft times a German first, because Jews were in and of Germany.
Until they weren’t.
And many an American comes from Mexican ancestry: many a Latino American is in and of America. Until they now aren’t. This positing the other, the outsider as the enemy, while wrapping one’s own identify in an unburnt flag, is, of course, very familiar to us Americans. What is rich in Prof. K’s observation is that the construction of this type of identity intimately wraps up with the cult figure’s idolized perfection. Quoting a true believer who spoke to Prof. K after Germany’s defeat into desolation: “’Everything is related to the issue of being German or non-German….You must understand that [it is my duty as a German] that I belong entirely to the Fuhrer.’”(109) How far away the often spoken sentiment of allegiance to The Donald, even if he were to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue (assuming it was not a tourist from Kansas. Or even then…?) Succinctly stated back in K’s Germany, even after Hitler’s body was burnt: “’…I still believe in HIM. I really do.’” (122)“
[mad lib here]’s childish and infantile attitude to the [mad lib here] …unites him with the dullest section of the population, which, in the age of the machine, is plainly not made up of the industrial proletariat, nor does it consist exclusively of the peasantry, but rather derives from the concentrated masses of the petty bourgeoisie.” (179) Perhaps our contemporary demographic parallel doesn’t hold exactly to Prof. K’s more socialist sympathies, but, through minor adjustments with the white power whistle, the movement, the trendency, the alignment holds. Witness the instinctive impulses fire-born in Trump rallies. “…the Fuhrer also possesses, seemingly from the outset, a large measure of that calculating guile which doesn’t seem to accord with an unsound mind, but so often seems to go hand in hand with it. He knows perfectly well that he can only expect loyalty from those who inhabit a similarly primitive world; and the simplest and most effective means of keeping them there is to nurture, legitimize and as it were glorify the instinctive hatred of the Jews.” (180) Read it again with your own mad lib blanks for Fuhrer and Jews.
So, build that wall, yes, build that wall, so that it’s clear what divides what. Mexicans, Muslims, some women, and, yes, always the Jews–all make the MAGA/Trump/Nixon-like enemy list of otherness. “For them anyone who dresses differently or speaks differently is not simply a different person, but a different animal from a different sty with whom there can be no accommodation, and who must be hated and hounded out.” (179)
But do we really need K’s voice from the horrific past to confirm these visions? Do we need to hear from a German professor of deep language to deepen our understanding of this “language which writes and thinks for you.”? (27) Certainly, these truths are self-evident. Right. Right? Or are they? “…a religious fanatic, a madman, often develops a high degree of ingenuity to minister to his madness, and experience has shown that the most powerful and lasting suggestion is brought into play by those con-men who have already conned themselves.” (115)
We are all susceptible to this poison. Even the good Prof K. felt the pull of this strong unreality. “It can’t be said with absolute certainly that all those who laughed at Goebbels’s all-too blatant lies actually remained unmoved by them. …I …know that a part of every intellectual’s soul belongs to the people, that all my awareness of being lied to, and my critical attentiveness, are of no avail when it comes to it; at some point the printed lie [or, better still, the online lie,] will get the better of me when it attacks from all sides and queried by fewer and fewer around me and finally by no one at all.” (229)
So let us be careful when laughing at malapropism of the POTUS or giggling at every Kelly-Anne interview or chuckling too hardily at comics’ spot on impersonations.
“It is also undeniable that the propaganda exposed as bragging and lies still works if you only have audacity to continue with it as if nothing has happened; the curse of the superlative is not always self-destructive, but all too often destroys the intellect which defies it….[that] the ineffective inanity [of Goebbels] was neither inane nor as ineffective.” (229) As Trump said, “I know words. I have the best words.” It would be stupid to ignore the impact of his rhetoric. “But there’s no better word than stupid.” Stupid.
Perhaps, to destroy a phrase from the POTUS, perhaps it is only fascist light. And this language which has infiltrated the American soul is not about deplorables; outside outside Charlottesville’s riot mob, the chanters, the haters, perhaps I could believe that there are good people on “both” sides. “And some I assume are good people” and that there are decent people who might have arguable positions outside of Trump’s irrationality, people who have been painted under the broad brush of a hostile and warped scream.
The language from Hitler’s Germany moved people to belief without a call to facts. In Professor Klemperer’s world, the language of fascism constructed a social reality without the coherent lines of argument. A language that disassembled any reasonable grounds for disagreement. There was no cure for the language of Nazi fascism but the war itself, and, even then, even then…
But we now speak in the language of the Trump administration, similarly a “language which writes and thinks for you.” (27) Today’s ‘dialogue’ has evaporated fact into hatred, destroyed the articulation of sound argument, so that now we all stand on shifting sands, struggling to stay upright against the same winds that tore apart Europe over 80 years ago.
The rest, the rest falls into a dark, screaming silence.
Or…to quote another German„ “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.”
…then again, in this case, this time, must we, stupid?