The Language of the Third Reich: Lti - Lingua Tertii Imperii : A Philologist's Notebook (Paperback)

by Victor Klemperer (Author), Martin Brady (Translator)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"...much more than the linguistic analyses for which it has been deservedly acclaimed....an essential supplement to [Klemperer's] diary." -- Center European History

Product Description
Under the Third Reich, the official language of Nazism came to be used as a political tool. The existing social culture was manipulated and subverted as the German people had their ethical values and their thoughts about politics, history and daily life recast in a new language. This notebook, originally called LTI (Lingua Tertii Imperii) - the abbreviation itself a parody of Nazified language - was written out of Klemperer's conviction that the language of the Third Reich helped to create its culture. As Klemperer writes: "it isn't only Nazi actions that have to vanish, but also the Nazi cast of mind, the typical Nazi way of thinking, and its breeding ground: the language of Nazism".

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Continuum International Publishing Group (July 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0826457770
• ISBN-13: 978-0826457776
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,556,560 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

49 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An easily-read, journalistic philology of Nazi Germany, July 25, 2000

By	David J. Greenbaum (Ithaca, NY USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Language of the Third Reich : Lti - Lingua Tertii Imperii : A Philologist's Notebook (Hardcover)

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.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Language Changes Everything, February 12, 2008

By	KerrLines ""Movies,Music,Theatre"" (Baltimore,MD) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Language of the Third Reich: LTI -- Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist's Notebook (Continuum Impacts) (Paperback)

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.

26 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Worth every cent., August 29, 2001

By	Andrew Hingston (Saint Helena, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Language of the Third Reich : Lti - Lingua Tertii Imperii : A Philologist's Notebook (Hardcover)

...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....