About the author: Roderick Watt received his Ph.D. from Edinburgh. He is currently Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Glasgow.1997 0-7734-8681-X
This book makes available in one volume the German text of Klemperer's seminal and still controversial analysis of the influence of National Socialist ideology on the German language, first published in 1947, along with an English-language editorial apparatus which enables the reader to set Klemperer's comments in their biographical, historical, cultural, and socio-political context. The notes and commentary draw on the latest research into the complex and much-debated relationship between National Socialist ideology and the German language. The original German text has been retained, precisely because so many aspects of the German language associated with the Third Reich, be they semantic, morphological, or even stylistic, are so deeply rooted in German culture and so intimately colored by the expressly stated program of the National Socialist propaganda machine to manipulate German for its own ideological aims, that they are effectively untranslatable. Provides a wealth of insights for sociolinguistics, philosophers of language, histories of the Third Reich, and those with an interest in twentieth-century German literature.