»Sprachhandeln«. Reflexionen über die deutsche Sprache nach dem Holocaust

International Workshop in cooperation of Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow (DI) and Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL) within the framework of the DFG/ANR cooperation project »Early Modes of Writing the Shoah. Practices of Knowledge and Textual Practices of Jewish Survivors in Europe 1942–1965«
Concept: Nicolas Berg (DI), Elisabeth Gallas (DI), Aurélia Kalisky (ZfL)

The theory that the German language was not just an innocent vehicle instrumentalized for expressing national-socialist thought but rather enabled such thought in the first place, was nowhere as decisively formulated as in George Steiner’s text The Hollow Miracle (1959). In it, he asserts that »Nazism found in the [German] language precisely what it needed to give voice to its savagery […], an immense outpouring of precise, serviceable words.« The contamination of the German language with its lingering national-socialist jargon was, for Steiner, not merely a literary phenomenon but an inherently epistemological one. His essay, furthermore, can be seen in the tradition of similar interventions reaching back to the 1930’s. Many German Jews realized early on that the new linguistic reality not only represented the changed political reality but also preceded it.

After 1945, the focus on language and its ability to incite violence can be found in a remarkable number of contemporary cultural diagnoses, such as in the work of Victor Klemperer, Nachman Blumental, H. G. Adler, Joseph Wulf or that of Peter Weiss. Several literary criticism projects were begun to examine how the German language was instrumentalized by the Nazis. This generated an entire corpus of studies and dictionaries, constituting its own genre of historical analysis. In such studies, language is seen as an action, speech as an intentional act, and its preparatory influence on the practice of dictatorship, displacement and annihilation is examined. At the same time, though, language was and stayed the realm in which new terminologies were ventured for the experiences of Jewish communities under the Nazi regime, experiences which could no longer be adequately described with regular vocabulary.

The workshop centers on these Jewish scholars reflecting on the German language in the face of catastrophe. In this vein, literary criticism will be discussed in its significance as a tool for cultural diagnosis and in its potential for a historical reflection of the holocaust.