Dangerous Language — Esperanto Under Hitler and Stalin
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Dangerous Language — Esperanto under Hitler and Stalin “This book gives a carefully supported account of a crucial aspect of the Esperanto movement’s history, focusing on political repression by totalitarian regimes, especially those of Hitler and Stalin. It also sheds light on opposition elsewhere and is eye-opening for anyone interested in language policy and global communication.” —Ulrich Ammon, Emeritus Professor of Germanic Linguistics at Duisburg-Essen University, Germany Ulrich Lins Dangerous Language — Esperanto under Hitler and Stalin Ulrich Lins Bonn, Germany Translated by Humphrey Tonkin ISBN 978-1-137-54916-7 ISBN 978-1-137-54917-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-54917-4 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956885 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. 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Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Cover image © Desintegrator / Alamy Stock Photo Cover design by Samantha Johnson Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom Editorial Note Transliteration from Russian and Ukrainian is based on the Library of Congress system. To make it easier on the reader, in Russian family names the ending ‘ii’ has been changed to ‘y’, and soft signs and diacritics have been omitted. In the footnotes and bibliography, however, I have followed standard Library of Congress transliteration. In references, in general, a translation is added only if the original is not in Roman script; names appear in the form used in the publication in question. For individuals from East Asian countries the family name appears first, and the given name follows. In the notes the full title of a book is indicated only in the first refer- ence in the chapter in question; in subsequent notes it appears in abbrevi- ated form. For frequently cited works (among them EdE, EeP, PVZ), see the list of abbreviations and, of course, the bibliography. Only in excep- tional cases are electronic sources indicated (links were last checked on 28 September 2016) In the case of journal articles, the title of the periodi- cal is normally followed by the volume number and year of publication. Where pagination extends over the entire volume, I have not indicated the specific issue in which the article appears. U.L. v Preface Every book has its history, this one included. Its earliest draft was published in 1973 by the publisher l’omnibuso in Kyoto, Japan. This version, little more than a pamphlet, had a tiny print run, but a year later its contents were printed as a section in the volume Esperanto en perspektivo. In 1975 an expanded version of the first edition appeared in Japanese translation, the work of Kurisu Kei. It was published in Tokyo by Iwanami. In 1988 a new, completely rewritten text was published—the result of several years of research in a vast array of source material.1 It was my desire to make an original contribution to research on the 100-year his- tory of Esperanto, devoting particular attention to a specific aspect of that history—an aspect long neglected, indeed regarded as something of a taboo, even among Esperantists. The topic was the opposition and persecution that Esperanto encountered for political and ideological rea- sons. I wanted to describe the fate of the adepts of a language that, over the decades, police, censors, nationalist ideologues and assorted dictators had denounced as ‘dangerous’. So I did not deal with the ‘internal’ history of the Esperanto movement so much as with the hostile reactions that Esperanto and its speakers 1 It was published, in agreement with the Universal Esperanto Association, by the German publisher Bleicher, and reprinted in 1990 in Moscow by Progress Publishers. In 1988 a German-language version also appeared, and this was followed by translations into Italian (1990), Russian (1999), Lithuanian (2005) and Korean (2013). vii viii Preface had endured from political regimes and ideologies, particularly Nazism and Stalinism. Likewise, it was not enough simply to limit the story to a description of the ways in which Esperanto had been attacked: it was important to present the arguments of its opponents and analyze the motives that prompted political regimes of very different character to harass the movement for Esperanto. Such motives could derive from fundamental ideological positions or from concrete political interests. In this same connection, I also tried to shed light on the attitudes of the movement itself, and of individual Esperantists: without an aware- ness of the origins of the language, the motives of Zamenhof, the modes of recruitment and the theory and structure of the movement, we can hardly hope to achieve an understanding of why Esperanto became such an object of persecution. New information, particularly archival material, has come to light since the 1988 edition and the fall of the Berlin Wall in the follow- ing year. So the present version of the study is different again. For the English-language version, I have expanded the story into two volumes, the first dealing with the persecution of Esperanto speakers and the sup- pression of the language in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, and the second describing the underlying causes of the demise of the language in the Soviet Union and its revival, first in Eastern Europe and then in Russia itself, after the death of Stalin and the gradual decline of the ideas we associate with Stalinism. The extraordinary story of Esperanto’s encounter with twentieth-century dictatorship raises many questions—questions that I attempt to address in this study. What was it that was so provocative about Esperanto? Was it the very existence of Esperanto as an international language or primarily the way in which it was used in practice? What was the political and social milieu in which Esperanto canvassed for its goal of a second language for all people? What role was played by adaptability and self-confidence in dealing with governments from which the movement hoped for support but which it nevertheless had no wish to rely on? What was the relationship between a ‘neutral’ language on the one hand and ‘idealistic’ enthusiasts on the other? How did the Esperantists relate to supporters of other goals aimed at worldwide solidarity, like pacifists, socialists and communists? And how did the Esperantists react to the—often Preface ix unexpected—conflicts with their opponents? What lessons did they carry away from the persecutions concerning their own definition of the Esperanto movement? To explain the difficult position of Esperanto on the battlefield of ideologies and power interests, I have tried to clarify the political development of the countries in question, particularly Tsarist Russia, Germany, the Balkan countries, China and Japan, and the Soviet Union. I hope that in this way I can shed some light on the history of the decades since 1887—from a different perspective. My basic intention has been precisely that: to show how much suspicion, hatred and resis- tance has been generated by an effort to establish non-discriminatory interpersonal communication—an effort which was often identified with specific groups (Jews, communists, petty bourgeois) but in fact repre- sents a self-sufficient integrative internationalism and, as such, refuses to conform to the usual categories. Thus the history of the persecution of Esperanto might stimulate conclusions that go beyond the subject of Esperanto—conclusions that maintain their validity in the present time. Thus, the revised Esperanto edition2 on which this English transla- tion is based takes into account numbers of newly discovered docu- ments, among them materials from the Soviet NKVD to which Russian researchers had access as of 1990 for a (limited) time. I have also tried to take into consideration relevant studies that have appeared in various countries and languages over the past 25 years. At the same time, I have decided to reduce the length of some chapters, for example in the section on the Soviet Union, and also discussion of persecutions of Esperantists aimed primarily at their political activities, for example in parts of Eastern Europe, and in China and Japan. My research has benefited greatly from material preserved in the German Federal Archive in Berlin, including papers newly available following German reunification. For several years my work has been assisted by con- sulting the Hector Hodler Library in Rotterdam, the Planned Language Collection and Esperanto Museum of the Austrian National Library in Vienna, and the library of the Japanese Esperanto Institute in Tokyo.