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Language of the Third Reich: Lti: Lingua Tertii Imperii a Philologist's Notebook (Continuum Collection)

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A professor recommended this book by Victor Klemperer to me several years ago, before his 1933-45 Tagebücher were translated into English by Martin Chalmers. At the time, my apprentice German was not equal to the work in the original language, and I read it in its French translation, ably translated by Elisabeth Guillot. I have since reread it in German, and, on publication, read this English edition. As far as I can tell, Martin Brady has done a masterful job of rendering Klemperer's informal and easily parsed style into addictably readable English. Before his career in the academy, Klemperer was a journalist, and in all of his writing, this tone prevailed.

Klemperer wrote his "LTI: Notizbuch eines Philologen" in 1945 and 1946, mostly from notes he kept in the diaries that later became the wildly successful "Ich will zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten" (I Will Bear Witness). He carried on his work despite the danger, and with an impressive amount of conscious objectivity. The work is an excellent, if impressionistic, study of the modes of Nazi language and their development in popular speech and culture. I would emphasize the _impressionism_ that colors this work, because Klemperer was only able to study a limited amount of presently accessible material; most of his work is based on the editions of newspapers, leaflets, and books that fell into his hands in Dresden during the war. He was a Jew in the Third Reich, and banned from possessing books written by "Aryan" authors. As well, over the course of the war the restrictions on Jews listening to radios, reading newspapers, and even talking in public became too great for Klemperer to realize any truly comprehensive study.

I do not wish to seem like I am condemning the man with faint praise: Klemperer wrote the first postwar study of Nazi language and linked it directly with the operation of the regime. Subsequent researchers have borne out Klemperer's thesis: the euphemisms and barbarisms in the Nazi tongue exerted a considerable influence on popular culture and personal expression. It is not necessary to go back to the Forties to find this influence - it exists today in modern German. The contemporary quibbles over such words as "ausrotten" or "endlösung" mask the considerable reformation of German that occurred during the Third Reich.

Students of twentieth century history cannot ignore this book. It is a must read.

Victor Klemperer,a Professor at Dresden University,catalogued words used by the Third Reich from 1933-1945.Klemperer was stripped of his tenure at the University when the Nazi's declared that Jews could not hold such positions.In that time,Klemperer notated the words that became the "catch" phrases and "now" words of the Fuhrer's thinking.These words,he noted,were the "language of poverty" and appealed to the common masses,i.e "dummying-down" the language.This language,though,as he referred to it as the "L.T.I", the Language of the Reich,became the words used on the bourgeois lips in order to enflame German people against the Jews, and to embolden them to rise up for their Fatherland.
Have you ever been in a conversation with someone who seems to "parrot" back what they have heard; nothing is an original thought, but only some form of "propaganda" or "mind-controlled" speech? I have! Perhaps this is why this book upset me so.I see and hear this everyday and it scares me to see how propaganda and word use in a very particular way can all of a sudden take on a new and more sinister meaning.
I read this fascinating book after seeing LANGUAGE DOES NOT LIE: The Victor Klemperer Diary on The Sundance Channel.
Other suggested materials concerning Klemperer,whose Diary was not published until 1995 include I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941 (Modern Library Paperbacks), I Will Bear Witness 1942-1945: A Diary of the Nazi Years,and Biography - Klemperer, Otto (1885-1973): An article from: Contemporary Authors,and The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror.
ANYONE WHO VALUES LANGUAGE, will undoubtedly find these books invaluable,fascinating,riveting and quite disturbing.

just a note about this book. reading it will not only help you understand history of the 20th century and of Germany under the Nazi Party's sickening rule, but will inform your hearing of the news and of governmental communications today. it will make your infuriation listening to the propaganda that has infiltrated culture at almost every level a much more informed infuriation. :-)

this is an excellent, excellent book and the two other reviews accurately describe it to a potential reader.

...this is an extraordinary book in any number of ways, and ought to be widely read....it's a book that almost anyone could read profitably, even many times. It's complexity is quite astonishing, but it's not the sort of complexity that is off-putting. In fact, it is so well written, so well organized, that it's complexity is almost unnoticeable. Still, it is a confession as well as an indictment, autobiography as well as analysis, cooly restrained and deeply moving often in the same paragraph. It is objective while being prfoundly personal. It wears it's Jewish spectacles (a phrase from the book) very lightly indeed.... More often it is wryly funny. It is its own evidence of the degree of assimilation (and blindness to the terror that was being prepared for them) of educated Jews in Germany prior to the rise of Nazism. It further substantiates, from a different angle, Arendt's famous insights into Nazi behavior. It contains in its preface an extraordinary statement of love, which, once read, informs the entire book. It is heartbreaking without once being sentimental. Indeed, it is heartbreaking in part because it resists the sentimental....

After I took a rather large block of time to read the entire edited entries of Victor Klemperer's diaries entitled "I shall Bear Witness" and "To the Bitter End", I went on to read Klemperer's thesis on the language of the Third Reich.
As a well known professor of philology, Klemperer goes into great detail as to the change of the German language during the 12 year reign of the Third Reich. Along with the daily writings of Klemperer's diaries, Victor also engaged in his thesis of the language change which occurred in Germany from 1933 to 1945.
Many things that were said during the aforementioned time period had double meanings. To a Jew in Nazi Germany, the word privilege had an ominous meaning. In fact many rather innocent words, phrases and idioms meant rather different things to different people in Nazi Germany.
Victor Klemperer had the time and also the temerity to note these changes in the German language. As an oppressed Jew who actually survived the Nazi regime, he indeed noted the change of meanings in language and also the change of meanings in the very essence of German being and culture.
Klemperer is a latter day descendant of a mythical fly on the wall. To note he was a rather highly educated fly. Herr Klemperer really did see the black side of a totalitarian government. What is amazing is that Klemperer did indeed survive. To add to this rather amazing fact, the person who survived, was indeed intelligent enough to write about the happenings and form a rather succinct opinion of what transpired.
This book in a gem. I'm going to read it again, in order to benefit from all of Klemperer's thesis. I'm sure I'll learn more of this rather gruesome time period. If you have an historian's inclination, please do read this rather magnificent work.