Home > LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii
LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen ( 1947) is a book by Victor Klemperer, Professor of French at the University of Dresden. The title, half in Latin and half in German, translates to (literally) About the language of the Third Empire, or The language of the Third Reich -- Notes of a Philologist.Lingua Tertii Imperii studies the way that Nazi propaganda altered regular the German language to educate people into National-Socialist ideas. The book was written under the form of personal notes which Klemperer wrote in his diary, especially from the rise of the Nazi regime in 1933, and even more after 1935, when Klemperer, stripped of his academic title because he was Jewish (under the Nuremberg Laws), had to work in a factory and started to use his diary as a personal exit to his frustrating and miserable life.
It underlines odd constructions of words intended to give a "scientific" or neutral aspect to otherwise heavily engaged discourses, as well as significant every-day behaviour.
1 Examples
Among the examples Klemperer recorded of propagandastic language use were the following.
1.1 Recurrent words
- Spontaneous
- Instinct
- Fanatical / Fanatism (used in a particulary Orwellian way: stronlgy positively connotated for the "good" side, and strongly negatively connotated for the "bad" side)
- Blindly
- Eternal
- Artfremd ("Alien to the specie")
1.2 Understatements
- Sonderbehandlung ("special treatment"): murder.
1.3 Recurrent expressions and motives
- the war "imposed" onto a peace-loving Führer (Technically right: indeed, the Nazis arranged border incident which allowed them to "respond" to aggressions by invading countries. The war against France and the United Kingdom was declared by these countries, not by Germany—though the invasion of Poland made the war inevitable.)
- the "uncommensurable hate" of the Jews—note the Orwellian ambiguity: the Jews bear an "uncommensurable hate" to the Third Reich (aggressive or conspiratorial), but the German people bear an "uncommensurable hate" to the Jews (spontaneous and legitimate).
1.4 Prefixes
- Welt- ("world", as in Weltanschauung, "intuition of the world): this was quite a rare term before he Third Reich, but became an everyday word. It came to designate the instinctive understanding of complex geo-political problems by the Nazis, which allowed them to openly begin invasions, twist facts or violate Human Rights, in the name of a higher ideal and in accordance to their theory of the world.
- Gross- ("grand")
- Volk- ("people"). Volkswagen is an exemple which out-lived the Third Reich.
1.5 Neologisms
- Untermenschentum ("under-humanity")
- entjuden ("un-jew")
- arisieren ("aryanise")
- aufnorden ("nordnise", make more Northern).
Victor Klemperer's work shows a German language twisted into a " newspeak"-like language. It also demonstrates how the rigid, unnatural, artificially twisted language came to be naturally spoken by most of the population. On the reverse, the text also emphasizes the idea that resistance to oppression begins by questionning the constant use of buzzwords. Eventually, both the book and his author unexpectedly survived the war. LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii was first published in 1947 in Germany.
2 Excerpts
2.1 Denaturisation of the German language
For my own part I have never been able to understand how he ( Hitler) was capable, with his unmelodious and raucous voice, with his crude, often un-Germanically constructed sentences, and with a conspicuous rhetoric entirely at odds with the character of the German language, of winning over the masses with his speeches, of holding their attention and subjugating them for such appalling lengths of time.
2.2 Fanatical
Only a year after the collapse of the Third Reach a strangely conclusive piece of evidence can be advanced to support the claim that "fanatical", this key National Socialist term, never really had the sting taken out of it by excessive use. For although scraps of the LTI surface all over the place in contemporary language, "fanatical" has disappeared. From this one can safely conclude that either consciously or subconsciously people remained aware of the real facts of the case all through those twelve years, namely, that a confused state of mind, equally close to sickness and criminality, was for twelve years held to be the greatest virtue.
