German Is Often Considered To Be less a language, and more an assault, maybe particularly so in the United Kingdom. John Cleese gave evidence of this attitude in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 26 May 2006 by saying that many English people, including him, think that German is a language that is barked, after having been conditioned by movies about English people escaping from German concentration camps. Most European countries formed this impression of German as a barked, rather than spoken language, if not already from Wilhelmine Germany, at the latest during the Second World War, and the media have since perpetuated this stereotype, particularly the tabloid press, but also many films. The “barbaric German language” has become a stereotype that is difficult to get rid of, and I intend to show that this damages not only the German reputation globally but also German society itself, and indirectly other nations as well. Additionally, it is based on a generally false conception of language.

“Normalization” has been the key term for German politics and society over the past fifteen years: should we Germanists apply it to the German language as well or will we continue in our discourse, more or less consciously, to promote a German “Sonderweg”? What role should we adopt in a situation in which our student numbers are dwindling, our departments are threatened with closure, and German language and German history are largely negatively perceived?

In this context, we cannot bypass the thorny issue of National Socialism and the effect it had and still has on German culture and language, or common ideas about them. I will first discuss the relation between language and society by drawing on the concepts developed by Wilhelm von Humboldt and Émile Benveniste, which are very useful for thinking language. By this unusual term, in analogy to the French “pensée du langage” or the German “Sprachdenken,” I want to stress the fact that thinking is done in language and that language is not only a tool. This will provide the foundation for the subsequent analyses of National Socialist language as well as a discussion of the consequences of preconceptions about German language after National Socialism, abroad (denigration) and in Germany (“Sprachscham”).