From Among The Many German-speaking émigrés in 1940s Los Angeles it is difficult to imagine two with seemingly more different views on the time-honored Lied than Hanns Eisler and Thomas Mann. What perhaps is most surprising is that Mann or Eisler gave the German art song any thought, for by the twentieth century’s fifth decade the favored mode of musical expression of Hugo Wolf, Johannes Brahms, Robert Schumann, and, above all, Franz Schubert—nineteenth-century composers all—found its critical fortunes waning. The author of Der Tod in Venedig and Der Zauberberg simultaneously lauded the genre while holding it responsible for the Third Reich. Eisler traveled a different path. Then devoting most of his attention to film music, little by little he also began composing Lieder, the result of which is an anthology of forty-seven, most dating to his first fifteen months in California beginning in May 1942, known as the Hollywooder Liederbuch (see the appendix for an overview). In this essay I make the case that German song provided Eisler with a medium to mediate a left-behind world and one that was at the time decidedly unsettled. I therefore part company with most scholars who have examined the composer’s lyric omnibus. It is not an exile’s outcry of despair, a retreat from life. It is his sonic shield and sword.

In advance of his novel Doktor Faustus (begun 1943, published 1947) Mann, on May 29, 1945, previewed his views on German music in a speech he gave less than a month after Hitler’s death. Calling his talk “Germany and the Germans,” he asserts that “music is a demonic realm … Christian art with a negative prefix … calculated order and chaos-breeding irrationality at once, rich in conjuring, in incantatory gestures, in magic numbers, the most unrealistic and yet the most impassioned of arts, mystical and abstract.” Laying a base for the equation that the German cult of music carries an unsuspected evil, the syphilitic infection of the fictional composer Adrian Leverkühn he will develop in Doktor Faustus, Mann charts “a secret union of the German sprit with the Demonic” through the plotline of a musical Faust.

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”).

As Of 1942, The German-Jewish professor of Romance languages Victor Klemperer undertook a thoroughgoing analysis of Nazi language in his diaries. In his journal, he provides concrete and painstakingly precise notes of his reflections on fascist institutions, his gradual exclusion from society as a Jew, the circumstances of ordinary people under National Socialism, including laws, working conditions, and the media. The following essay will offer a new way of approaching Klemperer’s critique of language by drawing on Erving Goffman’s examination of the consequences of exclusion and discrimination from the perspective of his theory of stigma, as formulated in his study Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963), and on Judith Butler’s analysis of the role injurious speech plays in constituting the subject in her book Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997). This essay sets out to illustrate how the language Klemperer investigates in his diary can be understood as hate speech, arguing that the Nazis’ racial classification “Jew” creates a Jewish identity among those who, like Klemperer, had both converted and assimilated into German society. By studying both direct and indirect statements and the vocabulary used in them, the diarist continuously strives to discover his interlocutors’ attitudes towards the National Socialist typology of identity and therefore, by extension, towards him.

It is in this context that Klemperer stresses the dangers of the ways in which National Socialist ideology politicizes all aspects of language: “Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxin sets in after all.” In defiance of this tendency, the author attempts to remove himself from the power of racial classification in Nazi discourse by shielding his national identity from National Socialism’s anti-Semitic eugenics and Social Darwinism: “Belonging to a nation depends less on blood than on language.”

Stigma

“The Jew” as a biological embodiment of the purpose-oriented spirit of modernity became the focal point of National Socialist ideology: through the “purifying” effect of exterminating “the Jew,” technology would be placed in the service of nature as a now liberated and reinvigorated force. The reactionary modernism represented by National Socialism fashioned a destructive synthesis of counter-Enlightenment and science, persecution and racial biology, and pogrom and bureaucratically organized mass murder.

Introduction

This Article Addresses Questions about the words used in Germany today to negotiate the National Socialist past. The principal focus of this discussion will be the memorial sites and places of remembrance that have been re-designed and re-named in many places, especially since Reunification, and in particular the youth concentration camp for girls and young women at Uckermark, which was transformed into an extermination site later in the war. Because language and language use play a central role in the interpretation of history, intense debates have been held regarding these re-designing and naming processes. This article will focus on the two main opposing positions at the core of these debates: one demands an explicit naming of the atrocities—along with the corresponding assumption of responsibility for them—while the other supports the use of what are, in my opinion, unclear language and naming practices. As an introduction, I will discuss how these two opposing poles, clarity and ambiguity, were already central to the language policies of Nazi Germany and later to those of the Allied forces: while one characteristic of so-called “NS-Deutsch” is its use of deceptive obfuscation (which can be observed particularly in the Nazis’ prolific employment of euphemisms), the Allies, by contrast, attempted during their denazification efforts to promote explicit speech practices.

Following that introduction, I will discuss how debates about the naming of the most well known memorial sites over the last decades have demonstrated that people are still struggling for clear wording. A central issue in these debates is a representation of history that has been criticized for using linguistic means to equate the National Socialist system with that of the German Democratic Republic. I would like to exemplify this by an analysis of the new Gedenkstättenkonzeption (Memorial Sites Concept) of the Federal Government and the Neue Wache memorial site in Berlin. Against that background, there is an ongoing struggle concerning the naming of the memorial site at Uckermark. This memorial site is not counted among the principal German memorial sites—it is one of the sites of National Socialist crimes whose existence has long been suppressed. By using this example, I will show that the opposition of clarity and ambiguity is also a central point of contention in the debate outside of the official arena.

There Is Seemingly No Escaping the association of the language of Goethe with the language of Hitler. Whatever one may feel about the rather leaden cliché that juxtaposes Buchenwald and Weimar, the disciplines of cultural history, literary criticism, discourse analysis, “Sprachkritik,” and memory studies have all, in their various ways, contributed to a rich field of concepts (“Tätersprache,” “Sprache des Nationalsozialismus” vs. “Sprache im Nationalsozialismus,” “unheimliche Heimat,” and many others) that both describe and embody the ambivalent, uneasy status of the German language and its traditions after the Shoah.

“Sprachkritiker” such as Victor Klemperer suggested that the Lingua Tertii Imperii was a perversion of German that needed to be purged from the language in order to restore its healthy traditions. However, does the notion of “Nazi language” as an identifiably separate entity really hold water, or is it simply a form of linguistic purism analogous to the desire to construct a clear demarcation line between “Germans” and “Nazis”? Is the German language really so fraught with history and violence that constant vigilance and self-reflexivity are necessary, or is neutral or even innocent speech in German still possible in the post-Holocaust world? And do the descendants of victims and of perpetrators have comparable attitudes and responsibilities regarding language, or radically different ones?

The poet Gerschon Ben-David, who had survived the Holocaust as a child with non-Jewish foster parents, and continued to write in German in Israel after his emigration in 1947, wrote strikingly in the 1960s about a longing for authentic communication with non-Jewish Germans and a fear that this communication can only take place in a social context in which language is characterized by cliché and the legacy of the Nazi assault on truth. How possible is it to break old habits and start anew?

For Ben-David, Jewish and non-Jewish speakers of German have similar longings, but the language is both that which connects them and that which divides them. By contrast, Ruth Klüger demonstrates a very different understanding of language.

From The 1930s Onwards German-speaking refugee writers who fled from National Socialist Central Europe to the UK had to make a stark choice regarding the language of their literary production: some continued to write in German, and if they were well-known or lucky, their works were translated into English (Anna Gmeyner, Stefan Zweig) as publication opportunities in German were very limited. Others tried to switch to English as soon as possible (Robert Neumann, Hilde Spiel). A small group of writers continued to write in German and ceased to publish until after the war (Max Herrmann-Neiße, Martina Wied). But all of these writers were adults when they came to the UK, mostly educated in Germany and Austria. What about the young refugees who came to the UK as children, who were not able to finish or, in some cases, even start their education in their country of origin?

A Kindertransport Memoir

There have been a growing number of autobiographical works written by refugees from National Socialism over the last twenty years. In the UK many of the authors were former child refugees who arrived on a Kindertransport. The term Kindertransport is usually applied to the rescue of nearly 10,000 unaccompanied minors mainly from Jewish family backgrounds from Germany and Austria to Britain between December 1938 and the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939. With the increasing interest since the end of the twentieth century in the Kindertransport as a British refugee movement, more and more autobiographical narratives have been written and published in English. However, this public interest in the UK is a relatively recent phenomenon. Ruth David is an example of a Jewish girl from Germany who fled to the UK on a Kindertransport aged ten. She was born Ruth Oppenheimer in Fränkisch-Crumbach in the Odenwald region of Hesse in Germany in 1929. Her mother Margarethe was the second wife of Moritz Oppenheimer, the owner of a cigar manufacturing business; both parents came from prominent Jewish families; Ruth had five siblings. In “Child of Our Time” she describes how her formerly well-respected family was affected by National Socialist persecution and became ostracised in the village community.

Ever since research on European public spheres has emerged in the social science and communication literatures, it has rested on implicit links with the question of European identity. With the crisis that emerged since the beginning of the 2010s, questions on whether a European identity would be strong enough to allow the European Union (EU) to survive through unprecedentedly turbulent waters became even more topical. In turn, European public spheres have been perceived as a cause, a consequence, or a symptom of European identity. Always, however, public-sphere researchers have considered European identity as the “bigger picture” that would bring citizens back into the equation. This chapter makes this implicit link somewhat more explicit and provides a direct understanding of how citizens’ European identity is potentially affected by news on Europe, thereby reflecting on the causal links that “bring politics back in.”

Much of the research on European identity and the European public spheres seems to have been built around a duality of assumptions that is nothing short of paradoxical. First, many have assumed that European identity could emerge only under the condition that a European public sphere in which European issues are debated exists. Second, any criticism of European institutions and policies perceived as “Euroskepticism” is assumed to potentially prove that the European identity does not exist. Although neither assumption is intellectually obvious, it seems to us that they are largely incompatible and, at face value, the public-sphere condition seems more tenable than the “skepticism-less” condition. Indeed, can a political system emerge without political debate? Can a political community emerge without politicization and political dissent? In this chapter, we support the argument that although politicization is not without risk (see, e.g., Hooghe and Marks 2006), it may not be only a necessary cause but also a necessary consequence of the emergence of a European identity. In other words, we suggest that the more European people feel, the more that they appropriate debates on Europe, the more polarized they can become about them, and the more politicized is their perception of “their” – thereby appropriated – system. This contrasts with an older perception – still rife in much of the mass media – that citizens would be either pro-European and like everything European as a result, or Euroskeptic and hate everything European as a matter of principle.

The euro crisis has been arguably the most profound crisis in the history of European integration. European Union (EU) and national policy makers have been regularly using references to war and peace, as well as the fate of the EU in general, to point to the severity of the crisis. As German Chancellor Angela Merkel stated: “The euro is our common fate, and Europe is our common future.” Or, to quote EU Commission President Josè Manuel Barroso: “We will defend the euro whatever the cost.” Core issues of European integration have assumed center stage in the domestic arenas of most member states:

• What should the future of the EU look like? Should the EU move toward a fiscal union that also includes joint economic policies and the transfer of financial support from the wealthier to the poorer member states? How should austerity policies be balanced with policies fostering economic growth in times of deep recession?

• How much “solidarity among strangers” (Habermas 2006a, 76) do Europe and the EU need in times of crisis? Is the “community of Europeans” (Risse 2010) strong enough to sustain fiscal transfers from Northern to Southern Europe to bail out countries facing the prospect of sovereign default?

• What about the future of European democracy at times when financial markets seem to determine the speed with which policy makers must make decisions involving billions of euros? What about the role of the European Parliament (EP) and of national parliaments in this?

The public salience of the euro crisis is unprecedented. A Google search for “euro crisis” results in 55.8 million hits, as compared to 8 million hits for “European constitutional treaty,” and only 719,000 hits for “Maastricht Treaty” (as of June 27, 2014).

The values and ideas of European integration often have been threatened in previous and current political and economic crises. The ongoing financial crisis, however, has made acute the discussion about transnational spaces for political debate because it has brought about an unprecedented level and intensity of communication and provoked a pressing public debate about the future of the market, the common currency, and the individual and collective costs of European solidarity for both countries and citizens. For scholars and public intellectuals, the political situation seems to offer a vivid example to observe in real time that European integration proceeds together with profound disagreement about its fundamental meaning. This communication also can be seen as a core constituent of a European public sphere. The question remains, however, about whether the public debate in the given circumstances is sufficient to meet the requirements of a true European community of communication that will eventually enhance a common identity.

Against this background, this chapter aims to understand the concepts and meanings of a European public sphere and the factors that are linked with various degrees and levels of transnational communication within and across Europe. We discuss the research on theories and measures of a European public sphere, thereby focusing on the communication flows, their interdiscursivity, and their convergence. Whether the actual communication is sufficient to qualify with respect to the normative requirements of true European democracy is still a contested theme. Since the early studies in the 1990s, scholars have debated how inclusive and convergent European communication within national public spheres must be to constitute a democratic European public sphere (Gerhards 1993, 2002; Wessler et al. 2008). Some researchers concentrate on the Europeanization of communicative flows as instances of transnational communicative interaction (Koopmans and Statham 2010b). Other scholars question whether and under what conditions transnational communication provides a space for an emerging European community of communication and the construction of a European identity (see, e.g., Wessler et al. 2008; Tobler 2010; and, in particular, Risse 2010; Van de Steeg 2010).

The often aggressive tone prevalent in public debates on the current European sovereign-debt crisis is seen by many observers as evidence of the long predicted impossibility of democratic governance beyond the nation-state, the lack of a European demos, and the lack of a resilient European identity. In this chapter, I argue that transnational political communication in the European Union (EU) is well developed and that we can clearly observe a gradient in comparison to non-EU countries such as the United States. In the national media, people find information and competing interpretations that enable them to form their opinions on the important issues concerning the shared economic, legal, and political space of the EU. Moreover, the various publics are not simply speaking past one another, in that they do share common themes, but they occasionally have conflicting opinions rooted in different interests and sometimes different values. Although in cases such as the European sovereign-debt crisis, the opposing camps seem to coincide with countries or groups of countries, the picture is more complicated because also within countries, the important issues are highly controversial. The European sovereign-debt crisis is an excellent example of an intense and highly politicized transnational debate.

This chapter proceeds as follows.

Europeanized public spheres affect politics. This broad claim is accepted by all of the contributors to this book, even while they disagree on other issues: the precise extent of Europeanization in this area (a little or a lot); the way to measure public spheres (claims, frame, or discourse analysis); where precisely to look for such spheres (among elites and the quality media or a more bottom-up, civil-society view); and – finally – the politics being affected by them (party-political cleavages or identity politics). My purpose here is not to adjudicate among these disputes; the book’s opening chapter does an excellent job of highlighting and justifying them while persuasively demonstrating the common ground shared by all (see Chapter 1). Thus, the collection is a state-of-the-art treatment of the subject matter – European public spheres – in the best sense of that phrase: telling the reader what we have learned but also where our knowledge is incomplete or disputed.

My chapter continues with this last point, making three arguments about these loose ends. First, the workings of public spheres are ultimately claims about the ability of language and communication to shape politics. Elsewhere, however, such linguistic approaches have been supplemented by analysts arguing that institutions, power, and practice are important as well; a similar move seems absent in work on public spheres (see Chapter 8). The result is incomplete arguments – for example, on the relationship of public spheres to changes in European identity.