Stigma and Performance: Victor Klemperer’s Language-Critical Reflections on Anti-Semitic Hate Speech

Summary

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.