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Making Sense of National Socialism: Linguistic Ideology and Linguistic Practices in Germany, 1933-1939

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Making Sense of National Socialism: Linguistic Ideology and Linguistic Practices in Germany, 1933-1939 MAKING SENSE OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM: LINGUISTIC IDEOLOGY AND LINGUISTIC PRACTICES IN GERMANY, 1933-1939 by Emily Elizabeth Sheppard A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Graduate Department of Social Justice Education Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto © Copyright by Emily Elizabeth Sheppard 2014 MAKING SENSE OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM: LINGUISTIC IDEOLOGY AND LINGUISTIC PRACTICES IN GERMANY, 1933-1939 Master of Arts 2014 Emily Elizabeth Sheppard Department of Social Justice Education University of Toronto Abstract This work approaches the question of how to make sense of German National Socialism from a joint political economic and linguistic perspective. It charts the historical emergence of Nazism and its linguistic ideology before analysing its linguistic practices in the fields of law, the mass media, and education. Plying these two strands together, it is argued that a racially-inflected understanding of language as “mother-tongue” informed the Nazis’ re-envisioning of German community, while certain practical uses of language contributed to the Nazi state’s attempt to make this community both discursively and materially real. Finally, the possibility is raised of extending the mode of enquiry modelled here to Italian Fascism and Spanish Francoism, but also to the linguistic ideologies and practices that characterise global capitalism, in an attempt to make sense of the present. ii Acknowledgments I would like to thank the members of my supervisory committee, Monica Heller and Bonnie McElhinny, for their support and guidance throughout the production of this thesis but also for having inspired it in the first place: it is to them that I owe the idea of combining political economic analysis with the study of linguistic ideologies and practices, an idea that I expect will remain a cornerstone of my work in future. I also owe many thanks to my brother and comrade, the terrific Owen Sheppard, for the many enlightening conversations we have shared on the topic of this work as on many others, and for the knack he has of listening to my jumbled thoughts and repeating them back to me in a way that makes more sense. I am tremendously grateful to the nice Michael Carswell, for having read my drafts, shared his ideas, caught the typos, and above all for having been an incomparable friend to me over the years. My wonderful aunt Linda Sheppard, too, has helped me immeasurably with her thoughtful reading, but most of all with her reliably good counsel and superb company. Thanks also to the excellent Michael Wayne for having been a sympathetic ear, a fascinating conversationalist, and a role model to me as I set out on the academic path. Finally, I am most thankful to one whose sharing of his experiences, ideas, encouragement, and most importantly his constant love and support has been invaluable to me, my dearest dad, Brian Sheppard. All translations in this work, unless otherwise noted in the reference list, are my own. iii Contents Abbreviations v Introduction: Making sense of National Socialism 1 1 National Socialism and the movements of history 7 2 Nazi ideology, linguistic ideology 20 2.1 Defining the Volksgemeinschaft 20 2.2 A brief history of German linguistic thought 24 2.3 Muttersprache and race 32 2.4 Making sense, making subjects 43 3 Founding the Volksgemeinschaft: The legal underpinnings of National Socialist community 46 4 Invoking the Volksgemeinschaft: Mass media under National Socialism 53 4.1 The National Socialist radio 55 4.2 The National Socialist press 62 5 Populating the Volksgemeinschaft: Formal education under National Socialism 72 6 Other times and places 88 6.1 Further avenues of enquiry into National Socialism 88 6.2 Future avenues of enquiry into fascism in twentieth-century Europe 91 6.3 Making sense, making senselessness 97 References 101 iv Abbreviations DNB Deutsches Nachrichten Büro GSWA German South West Africa NSDAP Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei NSLB Nationalsozialistischer Lehrerbund RGA Reich Genealogical Authority RKK Reichskulturkammer RMVP Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda RMWEV Reichsministerium für Wissenschaft, Erziehung, und Volksbildung RPK Reichspressekammer RRG Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft SD Sicherheitsdienst SS Schutzstaffel v Introduction: Making sense of National Socialism This work takes a broadly political economic approach to the question of how to make sense of National Socialism. This is a question with two parts: first, why did the German fascist state make sense in historical context? Or in other words, why this response to the particular conditions that obtained in Europe at this particular juncture? And second, how did Nazism actively make new sense? That is, how did it undertake the basically educative task of creating new sensibilities, meaning new standards of sense, or parameters of rationality, as well as new subjectivities that situated that rational agency within a peculiar form of social identity? These questions demand that we take into account both the material and the discursive structures of National Socialism. By “material” structures, I refer to the pattern of political and economic practices, manifested both in the enforcement of law and order and in the distribution of wealth and commodities through everyday life, that partially constrains actors, tending to channel their actions according to the strictures of a certain rationality. Yet “rationality” itself does not belong to this material realm, since it is not a constant quantity but a discursive construction. I use the term “discursive”, then, to refer to those practices that create the less tangible structures of the social environment: the word of law as opposed to its enforcement, for example, or the concept of class as opposed to the actual maldistribution of resources. These conceptual frameworks influence the behaviour of the individuals who act within them, but also permeate their mentality, setting the boundaries of right and wrong, good and bad, sensible and senseless, according to which actors interpret the world. In practice, of course, the material and the discursive cannot be so cleanly separated. Their relationship is dialectic, each partially underwriting, partially emanating from the other. The first part of our question then effectively asks how existing material structures supported the introduction of new discursive structures, with the background of the early twentieth-century European context causing the ideas and intentions expressed by the National Socialists to appear reasonable, not to mention appealing enough to enough individual actors that the young party was able to come to state power at all. The second part asks how these discursive structures, as elaborated by the National Socialists in power, in turn underwrote the establishment of new material structures, particularly new powers to police new state borders, but also the maintenance of certain existing structures, especially an inequitable system of economic distribution. Recast, the question of how to make sense of National Socialism thus asks how the National Socialists attempted by discursive means to transfigure popular interpretations of and interactions with material conditions—that is, social life—so as to rationalise new courses of action that appear senseless, at first glance, to an observer struggling to understand them after the fact. Centred on 1 2 the active, discursive labours of National Socialism, then, this work’s approach is therefore not only political economic but also centrally linguistic. Of course, any such work must take language into account because it is a basic, indeed inescapable, instrument of social life. Yet there is another element in the linguistic perspective: we should consider how language is not only a functional component of human sociality, but also an object of thought in its own right. This means considering, too, how the way people think is influenced by the political, economic, and indeed broadly social conditions in which the thinking goes on, for “language” is by no means a single, stable concept: is it a self-contained system or a historical palimpsest, a module in the brain or a learned social skill, a transparent medium of communication or an occluding and excluding marker of group identity? Each of these and many other understandings of language have appeared more or less sensible at different times in different places. Without wanting to suggest that ideas are ever an unconscious transcription of the setting in which they are expressed, we nevertheless achieve a fuller understanding of their significance when we view them within the broader context in which they circulate. Thus for the purposes of this work I understand language not only as a discursive tool for shaping the human environment, but also as a concept in itself that is inevitably the patient of that environment’s influence, existing in a mutually constitutive relationship with it. A final major question therefore arises, namely, what is the precise nature of the relationship between how language was thought about in the historical setting of National Socialism and how language was used to shape that setting? In other words, what is the connection between the linguistic ideology and linguistic practices of National Socialism? Within the relatively large literature delving more or less superficially into the characteristic “language of Nazism”, no author of whom I am aware addresses this question.
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