Language:
German
Year of publication:
2002
Titel der Quelle:
Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie
Angaben zur Quelle:
118,4 (2002) 529-572
Keywords:
Nazi concentration camps
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Terminology
Abstract:
After describing the subhuman, depersonalizing conditions in the concentration camps, analyzes restriction of communication as one of the means of this depersonalization. The camps were a Babel of languages; but the official and only permitted one was German, which most of the prisoners neither understood nor spoke. Not understanding and not responding properly (in German) to an order could mean death. Analyzes the language of the SS, which consisted of bureaucratic euphemisms for genocide on the one hand and verbal, usually scatological, abuse of the prisoners on the other, and that of the prisoners, who communicated with speakers of other languages using a meager vocabulary, often deformations of German words heard from the guards, and a truncated syntax consisting mostly of substantives and infinitives. With one's own countrymen one could speak in one's mother tongue only when there were no guards within earshot. Insistence on the preservation of ordinary civil discourse was also a means of resistance and of preservation of the personality.
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