J. Davidson - Planet Word

Victor Klamperer, a German Jewish Professor of Literature, documented in his book LTI, Lingua Tertii Imperii (The Language of the Third Reich) the daily mental corruption of the German people through language. Klamperer escaped the gas chambers because his wife was Aryan.

Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously … Language does not simply write and think for me, it also increasingly dictates my feelings and governs my entire spiritual being the more unquestioningly and unconsciously I abandon myself to it. And what happens if the cultivated language is made up of poisonous elements or has been made the bearer of poisons? Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all.

The city of Leipzig lies in what we used to call East Germany. This part of Germany suffered two extreme regimes in the last century — the fascist Nazis and then the communists, who controlled what was then called the GDR (German Democratic Republic) from the end of the Second World War until 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Like the Nazis, the communists were expert at using language to control and subdue, changing words and changing the meaning of words to suit their political purposes. In the former headquarters of the notorious Staatssicherheit — the Stasi, probably the most famous secret police after the KGB — political satirist Gunter Böhnke recalls that party officials called the secret police ‘die Sicherheit’ — the security. Ordinary people nicknamed it ‘die Stasi’, making it sound feminine — a bit like us calling the police ‘the She Police’, he says. It was the public’s small way of showing defiance, making the Stasi seem less frightening.

The Berlin Wall was officially called the ‘Anti-Fascist Barrier’ by the GDR authorities, but, as Gunter recalls, ‘the barbed wire was not facing the West but to the East. Everybody could see that the enemies could come in. But you were not allowed to go out.’

The GDR was nothing like the Nazi regime in terms of terror and murder. This was a much more insidious tyranny in which all conversations were monitored by an army of citizen spies — some estimates say as many as one for every six and a half members of the population. Gunter describes it as a sort of mind control where even telling a joke was dangerous.

‘My mother lost her purse with a number of Ulbricht [Walter Ulbricht, GDR leader] jokes in it, and for months on end with every ringing of the bell, we thought the Stasi will come and take our mother because of these jokes. It was enough just to tell a joke. There was a teacher of Russian who told a joke to his colleagues about Krushchev. Somebody reported him to the Stasi, and he was sacked from school and had to work in a chemical factory. Very hard, very dirty work. This was in 1962.’

Gunter himself was allowed to perform comedy cabaret shows as a ‘steam valve’ as long as the jokes didn’t attack senior party officials. George Orwell wrote: ‘Every joke is a tiny revolution,’ and despite the danger from informants, political jokes thrived. Some of the more critical ones were known as ‘five-year jokes’ — three years in prison for the person telling it and two years for everyone else who listened and laughed.

In the 1970s and 80s the GDR leader, Erich Honecker, was the target of a number of jokes. This one features in the 2006 Oscar-winning film The Lives of Others :

Erich Honecker arrives at his office early one morning. Opening his window he sees the sun and says, ‘Good morning, dear sun.’

The sun replies, ‘Good morning, dear Erich!’

Honecker gets on with his work and at noon he opens the window and says ‘Good day, dear sun.’

And the sun replies, ‘Good day, dear Erich.’

In the evening, as he heads out of his office, Erich goes again to the window and says, ‘Good evening, dear sun.’ The sun is silent. Honecker says again, ‘Good evening, dear sun! What’s the matter?’

The sun replies, ‘Kiss my arse! I’m in the West now.’

Given the atrocities in our history perpetrated by one group against another, it’s not surprising that many governments and institutions have tried to legislate against so-called hate speech — disparaging remarks about religions, ethnicities, nationalities, sexualities and genders. But who defines hate speech? Can we prevent hate speech without encroaching on freedom of speech? And does making something taboo merely give it more power?

This chapter began with the Seven Words You Cannot Say — swear words which our forefathers would physically recoil at but whose power to offend this generation is waning. Today, old taboos have been replaced by new ones, which language and humour have to negotiate. These are the taboos of homosexuality and disability and — the issue which probably makes us most uncomfortable and which hardly bothered previous generations — race. When we joke about race we tread on eggshells. There are words we just don’t use. And the most offensive one is probably the word nigger . F-words and c-words cause only mild ripples these days, but the n-word is extremely loaded.

It wasn’t always like this. Older readers may remember merrily reciting a children’s counting rhyme:

It was acceptable right into the 1970s, just as collecting the Golliwog stickers off the back of jars of Robertson’s jam and sending them off for a Golliwog badge seemed an innocent hobby. There was little fuss when Agatha Christie published her bestselling detective thriller Ten Little Niggers in 1939 — although the Americans brought it out as And Then There Were None the following year. British publishers didn’t change the title until 1985.

A proposed remake of the 1955 film The Dam Busters has stepped into a quagmire of political correctness. One of the film’s main characters was Guy Gibson, the RAF commander of the British mission that destroyed German dams with ‘bouncing’ bombs in the Second World War Two. Gibson had a black Labrador called Nigger — a common enough name for a black dog in those days; it was also the radio codeword used to report the success of Gibson’s squadron on one of the targets. ITV broadcast a censored version of the original film in 1999 with all ‘Nigger’ utterances deleted; the Americans dubbed over ‘Nigger’ to make it ‘Trigger’. So should the film-makers stick to the facts or alter history, changing a name that was perfectly acceptable in the 1940s and 50s so as not to offend people today? As the director of the remake, Peter Jackson, notes, ‘We’re in a no-win, damned if you do and damned if you don’t scenario.’

A much more objectionable rewriting of history in the name of political correctness was the publication of an edition of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn in 2011 with every mention of ‘nigger’ excised and replaced — over 200 times — with the word slave . It’s been described as a kind of ethnic cleansing, a whitewashing of the fact that black people in the American South in the mid nineteenth century were referred to as ‘niggers’. And a complete failure to understand that Huckleberry Finn is actually anti-racist.

The Americans are acutely sensitive about the n-word; it makes them linguistically twitchy. In 1999, David Howard, a white aide to the black mayor of Washington, DC, was having a financial discussion with a black colleague when he talked about being ‘niggardly’ with the budget. Now niggardly means ‘miserly’, probably from the Old Norse hnøgger for stingy. But it’s an uncommon word and it sounds like nigger , so was interpreted as a racial slur. A complaint was lodged, and Howard tendered his resignation. It was accepted with alacrity by the mayor. A national debate on political correctness ensued, with the chairman of the African-American civil rights group Julian Bond, opining: ‘David Howard should not have quit. Mayor Williams should bring him back — and order dictionaries issued to all staff who need them … Seems to me the mayor has been niggardly in his judgment on the issue.’ David Howard was brought back to work in the mayor’s office.