As a student I once got annoyed with an English specialist who counted how many times drumming, piping and other war-like music occurred in the works of Shakespeare. In my foolishness I called this activity dry pedantry . . . And in my diaries of the Hitler period there appears as early as 1940 the note: “Topic for university seminar: ascertain how often the word fanatisch {fanatical} and Fanatismus {fanaticism} are used in official communications, how often they occur in publications which have nothing directly to do with politics, in the latest novels for example, or in translations from other languages.’ Three years later I come back to this question with the unequivocal answer: impossible! ‘Their use is legion, fanatical is used as frequently “as there as notes on a violin or grains of sand on the beach”. More important, however, than the frequency of the word is its change in meaning. I have already spoken about this in my 18ième, in which I quoted a very strange passage from Rousseau, one which probably very few people have noticed. If only the manuscript had survived . . . ‘ It has survived. Fanatique and fanatisme are words which the French Enlightenment uses as terms of the utmost censure. There are two reasons for this. Originally – the root of the word is fanum, the shrine, the temple – a fanatic was someone in a state of religious rapture racked by ecstatic convulsions. Because the Enlightenment thinkers oppose anything which leads to the dulling or suppression of thinking, and because, as enemies of the Church, they attack religious mania with particular ferocity, the fanatic is the natural adversary of their rationalism. For them the personfication of the fanatique is Ravaillac who murdered good King Henry IV out of a religious fanaticism of this kind. If, on the other hand, you accuse the Enlightenment thinkers themselves of fanaticism, they will deny it, claiming that their own zeal is simply a battle against the enemies of reason fought with the weapons of reason. Wherever Enlightenment thinking is to be found, the notions of fanaticism always evokes a feeling of antipathy and censure. ‘Bayle has proved conclusively that fanaticism is more pernicious than godlessness, a fact which is indisputable; but he also kept to himself a no-less-significant truth: namely that in all its bloodlust and cruelty, fanaticism is a great and powerful passion which inflames the hearts of men, enables them to scorn death, gives them abundant vitality, and should be better directed to bring forth exalted virtues; a lack of faith, on the other hand, along with sagacious Enlightenment thinking in general, leads to an excessive desire to cling onto life, to debility and to abasement of the soul, it channels all passions into the service of vulgar private interests and reprehensible egotism, thereby stealthily undermining the true principles on which every society is based.’ ‘Language which writes and thinks for you . . . ‘ Poison which you drink unawares and which has its effect – this can’t be said often enough. Seven months previously, Aryans and Non-Aryans had been united in their belief in a common legend. The Babisnau poplar. The tree stands on the range of hills to the south east of the city, strangely isolated, conspicuous and pre-eminent, visible from a surprisingly large number of different locations. It was at the beginning of May that my wife told me for the first time that in the tram she had heard people talking about the Babisnau poplar, but didn’t know what it was all about. A few days later I also heard people at the factory uttering the words ‘the Babisnau poplar!’ I asked why they were talking about it. They replied, ‘Because it’s in blossom.’ This was a rare occurrence; it had happened in 1918, and in 1918 was the year in which peace was declared. A female worker immediately corrected him, saying that this had not only happened in 1918, but also in 19871. ‘And in other wars during the last century,’ a forewoman added, and the porter concluded that ‘every time it has blossomed peace has been made’. The following Monday Feder said, ‘There was a real exodus yesterday to the Babisnau poplar. It really is blossoming magnificently. Perhaps there will be peace – you can never dismiss popular belief out of hand.’ Feder, with his Star of David, and the cap to protect him from the dust, which he had fashioned from his old judge’s biretta. Every elementary school pupil learns that there are no fixed boundaries separating the different kingdoms of nature. Generally less well-known and acknowledged is the fact that there are also no hard and fast boundaries in the realm of aesthetics. Modern painting and literature – this is the correct order, because painting was there before literature – are generally subdivided into two categories, Impressionism and Expressionism; the terminological scissors have to be able to cut and divide cleanly, since we are dealing here with absolute opposites. The Impressionist is entirely at the mercy of the impression of things, he reproduces what he has taken in: he is passive, he allows himself to be influenced by his experiences at every moment, is a different person at every moment, has no fixed, uniform and unchanging soul, no immutable self. The Expressionist starts with himself, he doesn’t acknowledge the power of material objects but rather stamps them with his own signature, with his own will, expresses himself through them and in them, moulds them according to his own nature: he is active and his actions are determined by a resolute self-assurance in his constant and immutable self. So far so good. However, the artist of impressions deliberately reproduces what he himself actually saw, and how he saw it, rather than an objective image of the real world; he doesn’t reproduce the tree with all its leaves, the individual leaf with its unique shape, the actual green or yellow hues, the actual light of a particular time of the day or year, under particular weather conditions, but rather the way his eyes perceive the leaves merge into a single mass, colour and light corresponding to his disposition at that particular moment, in other words the mood which he imposes onto the reality of material objects. Is there anything passive about his behaviour? He is just as aesthetically active and just as much an expressive artist as his counterpart, the Expressionist. The distinction only survives on an ethical level: the self-confident Expressionist prescribes fixed rules for himself and the world around him, he has a sense of responsibility. The vacillating Impressionist, who changes from one hour to the next, claims amoral behaviour as an excuse for his own irresponsibility and that of others. Yet here too the boundaries inevitable become blurred. Conscious of the helplessness of the individual, the Impressionist becomes socially compassionate and actively engages in supporting oppressed and bewildered creatures; there is no difference here between Impressionists such as Zola or the Goncourt brothers, and Expressionists like Toller, Unruh or Becher. No, I have no faith in purely aesthetic observations in the context of the history of ideas, literature, art and language. The starting point has to be fundamental human attitudes; the sensual means of expression can from time to time be identical despite entirely contradictory goals. This is particularly true of Expressionism: Toller, who was killed by National Socialism, and Johst, who became president of an academy in the Third Reich, both belong to the Expressionist movement. The LTI either inherits from the Expressionists, or shares with them, certain ways of expressing the importance of the will and a fervently thrusting forward momentum. I am forced here to write SS with the sinuous lines of a normal typeface. During the Hitler period printers’ cases and keyboards of official typewriters included the special angular SS character. It was in keeping with the Germanic rune of victory and was created in honour of this symbol. However, it was also connected with Expressionism. Amongst the expression used by soldiers during the First World War was the adjective zackig {smart}. A strict military salute is zackig, a command or an address can be given in a zackig manner, anything that conveys a taut and disciplined expenditure of energy is zackig. It designates a form of expression quintessential to Expressionist painting and Expressionist literary language. On seeing a National Socialist SS symbol, the first thing to spring to mind for someone without a philological education was undoubtedly the concept of ‘zackig’. But there was more. Long before the Nazi SS even existed, its symbol was to be seen painted in red on electricity substations, and below it the warning ‘Danger – High Voltage!’ In this case the jagged S was obviously a stylized representation of a flash of lightening. That thunderbold, whose velocity and capacity for storing energy made it such a popular symbol for the Nazis! Thus the SS character was also a direct embodiment, a painterly expression of lightning. Here the double line may well suggest increased energy, because the little black flags of the children’s formations only bore one jagged bolt, what you might call a half-SS. Although someone who comes up with a particular symbol may not be aware of it, there are often many reasons for it; this seems to me to be the case here: SS is two different things at once, an image and an abstract character, it encroaches on the realm of painting, it is a pictogramme, a return to the physicality of the hieroglyph. But if it really is the case that I can provide equally good reasons for what did happen and what didn’t, but should have, what have I actually proved or explained? Here too – the blurring of boundaries, uncertainty, vacillation and doubt. Montaigne’s position: Que sais-je, what do I know? Renan’s position: the question mark – the most important of all punctuation marks. A position in direct opposition to National Socialist intransigence and self-confidence. Mankind’s pendulum swings between these two extremes and tries to find a happy medium. It was endlessly claimed by Hitler and others during the period that all progress was thanks for the intransigent, that all inhibitions stemmed from the supporters of the question mark. This is not necessarily true, but it is certainly the case that only the intransigent have blood on their hands. From time to time it is possible to detect, both amongst individuals and groups, a characteristic preference for one particular punctuation mark. Academics love the semicolon; their hankering after logic demands a division which is more emphatic than a comma, but not quite as absolute a demarcation as a full stop. Renan the sceptic declares that it is impossible to overuse the question mark. The Sturm und Drang needed an unusually large number of exclamation marks. The early Naturalists in Germany were fond of the dash: the sentences and lines of argument are not set down with bureaucratic precision, instead they break off, go off at tangents, remain incomplete and are, in keeping with the spirit of their inception, intrinsically fleeting, unstable and associative, akin both to an inner monologue and the kind of heated discussion that often takes place between people who are not used to systematic thinking. One would naturally assume that the LTI, given its fundamentally rhetorical nature and constant appeal to the emotions, would be devoted to exclamation marks like the Sturm und Drang. In fact they are not at all conspicuous; on the contrary, the LTI appears to me only to have used this sign very sparingly. It is as if it turns everything into a command or proclamation as a matter of course and therefore has no need of a special punctuation mark to highlight the fact – where after all are the sober utterances against which the proclamation would need to stand out? Instead the LTI makes exhaustive use of what I would call ironic inverted commas. The simple, primary inverted comma merely denotes the exact words spoken or written by someone else. The ironic inverted comma is not restricted to this neutral form of quotation, instead it questions the truth of that which is quoted, declares that the reported remark is untrue. In rendering that which in spoken language would be expressed by the mere adoption of a sarcastic tone, the ironic inverted comma is closely allied to the rhetorical character of the LTI. It certainly wasn’t invented by it. During the First World War, when the Germans were extolling the virtues of their superior culture and looking down on Western civilization as if it were an inferior, entirely superficial achievement, the French never failed to include the ironic sixty-sixes and ninety-nines when referring to the “culture allemande”, and it is likely that there was an ironic use of the inverted comma alongside the neutral one right from the outset. But in the case of the LTI the ironic use outweighs the neutral one many times over. Because the LTI particularly loathes neutrality, because it always has to have an adversary and always has to drag this adversary down. If the Spanish revolutionaries gain a victory, if they have officers or a general staff, they are invariably ‘red’ “victories”’, ‘red “officers’, ‘a red “general staff’”. Later the same was true of the Russian ‘“strategy”’ and of Yugoslavia’s “‘Marschal” Tito’. Chamberlain and Churchill and Roosevelt are always only “statesmen” in ironic inverted commas, Einstein is a “research scientist”, Rathenau a “german” and Heine a ‘“German writer’. There is not a single newspaper article or imprint of a speech which is not crawling with these ironic inverted commas, and they are also to be found in more temperate and expansive studies. They belong to both the printed LTI and the intonation of Hitler and Goebbels, they are intrinsic to them. As a sixth-former in 1900 I had to write an essay about monuments. One of the sentences in the essay read: ‘After the war of 1870 there was a victorious Germania bearing a flag and sword on almost every German market place; I could give hundreds of examples.’ My sceptical Latin master wrote in the margin in red ink: ‘Provide a dozen examples by the next class.’ I could only find nine, and was cured once and for all of biting off more numbers than I could chew. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that I have a good deal to say in my LTI observations concerning precisely the misuse of numbers, I can declare with a clear conscience regarding the use of ironic inverted commas that ‘thousands of examples can be given.’ One of these otherwise thoroughly uniform thousand examples reads: ‘there is a difference between German cats and “pedigree” cats’. There was an old grammar school joke which was handed down from generation to generation; now that Greek is taught in only a handful of secondary schools it has probably died out. The joke ran as follows: how did the German word Fuchs {fox} evolve from the Greek word for fox, alopex (ἀλώπηξ)? Through the sequence alopex, lopex, pex, pix, pax, pucks, Fuchs. I hadn’t thought of this again since my Matura some thirty years ago. On 13 January 1934 it suddenly sprang into my mind with such clarity that it was as if I had last quoted it only the day before. This happened whilst I was reading the 72nd issue of our termly bulletin. In it his Magnificence informed us that our colleague Israel, professor extraordinarius and National Socialist city councillor, had reverted to using his old family name ‘with the permission of the Ministry’. ‘In the sixteenth century it was called Oesterhelt, which is in Lusatia, and was corrupted to Israel via, amongst others, the names Uesterhelt, Isterhal (also Isterheil and Osterheil), Israel and Isserel. This was the first time that I was made aware of the question of names in the LTI. Later, every time I passed the shiny new Oesterheld nameplate – it was attached to some garden gate or other in the Swiss quarter – I reproached myself for considering even this particular question as sub specie Judaeorum. It was by no means restricted to specifically Jewish matters, and it also not a question that only relates to the LTI. In every revolution, be it political, social, artistic, or literary in nature, there are always two principles at work: on the one hand the appetite for the new, whereby the total contrast with what was previously valid is swiftly stressed, and on the other the need to connect with the past, to use tradition as a defence. What one is doing isn’t absolutely new, rather it is a return to those things which the foregoing age had shamefully rejected, a return to humanity, the nation, morality or the true nature of art etc. etc. Both tendencies are manifest in naming and renaming. no German child can be called Lea or Sara; if an unworldly priest were one day to come up with the idea of registering such a name, the registrar would refuse to enter it and the priest’s complaint would be dismissed from on high. In the Physics Department the name Einstein had to be hushed up and the ‘Hertz’ unit of frequency could also not be referred by its Jewish name. However, since the idea is not only to protect the German national comrades from Jewish names, but also, more importantly, the safeguard them from any contact with the Jews themselves, the latter are most carefully segregated. And one of the principal means of this kind of segregation is to point to their names. I want to mention a minor case of falsifying documents which concerns me personally and which helped save my life. I am sure that my case will not be the only one. The LTI was a prison language (of jailers and prisoners), and integral to the language of prisons (as acts of self-defence) are secret words, confusing ambiguities and forgeries etc. etc. Waldmann was better off than we were after we had been rescused from the destruction of Dresden and brought to the military airfield at Klitzsche. We had torn off our Stars of David, we had left the precincts of Dresden, we had sat together with Aryans inside a car, in short we had committed a whole bunch of deadly sins, each of which would have earned us the death penalty, a death by hanging, if we had fallen into the hands of the Gestapo. ‘In the Dresden address book’, said Waldmann, ‘there are eight Waldmanns, and I am the only Jew amongst them – who is going to spot my name?’ But with mine it was an entirely different matter. A common Jewish name beyond the border with Bohemia, Klemperer has nothing to do with the trade of the Klempner {plumber} but instead refers to someone who knocks, the beadle who knocks on the doors and windows of the pious in the morning and calls them to morning prayers, and there were only a small number of well-known specimens in Dresden, and after so many years of terror I was the only surviving one. The apparent loss of all my papers would only make me suspect, and it was impossible in the long run to avoid all encounters with officials: we needed ration cards, we needed tickets to travel – we were still very civilized and still believed such cards to be necessary . . . at almost the same instant we remembered a medicine bottle that had bene prescribed for me. The prescription, in a doctor’s illegible handwriting, had completely changed my name by two minor alterations. A single dot sufficed to turn an ‘m’ into ‘in’ and a millimetre-long line changed the first ‘r’ into a ’t’. Thus Klemperer became Kleinpeter. There was unlikely to have been a post office which would have registered the total number of these Kleinpeters in the Third Reich.