The Language of the Third Reich: LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook

By Victor Klemperer

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In 1933, when the Nazis came to power, Victor Klemperer (1881-1960) served as a distinguished professor of French literature at the University of Dresden. Two years later, however, under the Nuremberg Laws of Citizenship and Race, the Nazis removed Klemperer, a German Jew, from his teaching position and banned him from any public discourse and study. Expelled from his home, forced to perform manual labor in factories, and routinely interrogated and beaten by the Gestapo, Klemperer kept a diary that became for him a place of refuge, his “balancing pole.” There, he recorded his observations of daily life and collected information on the growing lexicon of Nazi terminology and phrases.

Klemperer’s interest in philology, the study and analysis of language, developed during this time. Out of his diary grew this book, The Language of the Third Reich. In it, he explores how everyday language came to shape society in Nazi Germany and deftly highlights the power of language as a political tool.

In order to standardize language to conform to the party line, the National Socialist leadership made extensive, repetitious use of acronyms, euphemisms, and other impersonal terminology. In this carefully-crafted work, Klemperer analyzes how such language can hide the motives and intentions of its creators. For instance, the term Sonderbehandlung [special treatment] refers to murder, and the term Endlösung [final solution] is a clandestine reference to the systematic slaughter and annihilation of the Jewish people.

With abstracted language permeating daily life in the Third Reich, perpetrators, bystanders, and victims subconsciously began to communicate through the mandated code. As Klemperer puts it, everything “swam in the same brown sauce” and “supporters and opponents, beneficiaries and victims all conformed to the same models.” The title of the book itself is a manipulation of language: “LTI,” the acronym for “Language of the Third Reich” translated into Latin, was the code Klemperer used in his diary whenever he made a note to himself about a particular phrase or word used by the Nazis.

Originally published in German in 1947, The Language of the Third Reich consists of short, practical essays about the themes, expressions and particular words, such as Volk [people] and fanatisch [fanatical], which became standard-bearers for Third Reich ideology. It includes bibliographical references and an index.

296 pages
ISBN: 0-485-11526-3
Call no: PF3074 .K613 2000

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