Answer: Euphemism.

Topography of Terror – Niederkirchnerstrasse, Berlin

Just back from Berlin and the Topography of Terror project, which catalogues the horrors of the Nazi era through images and texts. The building is located on the site previously occupied by the headquarters of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Head Office – RSHO). Photographs of the SS staff enjoying away-days from the camps, and children subjected to medical experiments speak for themselves, but the extent to which language was used to intimidate, manipulate and subjugate still shocks. The revelation is that so many people who committed such unspeakable acts really believed they were simply ‘doing their duty’.

Auschwitz staff away day

The purpose of a political euphemism is to manage perception. Orwell called it ‘The defence of the indefensible. Language designed to make lies sound truthful, and murder respectable. To give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’ The Nazis weren’t the first and they won’t be the last, but they excelled in using language to alter people’s morality.

The RSHO centralised scientific research, intelligence gathering, monitoring opinion, indoctrination, criminal investigation and overseeing foreigners within a single super agency. It became the ideological engine of radicalisation, and developed a sophisticated understanding of misinformation and managing emotions. Experts with degrees in philosophy, psychology, history, anthropology, economics and law transformed Hitler’s slogans into processes, directives and assignments. Staff were implicated in atrocities by constant rotation from desk jobs to ‘practical pursuits’. The Gestapo was not a fixed entity, but a ‘…constantly evolving organism’ that disseminated ‘…uncertainty and confusion to breed anxiety and conjecture’.

Death to Lies

One of the justifications for the Reich’s expansionism was Lebensraum or ‘living space’, which it needed to fulfil the 1000-year vision of world domination. Central Europe was regarded as ‘German cultural soil’ and anyone who threatened this had to be dealt with. The term ‘protective custody’ was introduced after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933 to weed out ‘rogue elements’ that would obstruct the establishment of a totalitarian regime. The phrase had nothing to do with protecting the individual, but protecting the State from the individual. The language-driven paranoia that the Fatherland was ‘under attack’ from ‘subversive forces’ justified any means. The language was a societal anaesthetic, shrewdly administered to make ‘the unthinkable acceptable’. Every neighbourhood in Berlin had SA ‘club houses’ where suspects were ‘purged’ or ‘neutralised’. Nazi philosophy declared that ‘All Men Are Not Equal’, and anyone who questioned this was suspect. You proved your loyalty by reporting on friends, family, neighbours and colleagues who might be expressing ‘un-German’ tendencies. Opponents of the ‘Volk Community’ were ‘racial enemies’. They were invited to ‘assist the Gestapo with their enquiries’ and ultimately ‘excluded’ from the community without defence, trial or appeal.

Chart describing the Nuremberg Laws, 1935.

By 1938, occupational bans and revoked trade licences excluded Jews and Romas from employment, making them dependent on charity and the State. This ostracism generated public hostility, and accusations of being ‘work shy leeches’ justified forcing them into slave labour. Many companies such as VW, BMW, Daimler Benz, Siemens and Krupp who were already profiting from Germany’s rearmament benefited. Labour camps exploiting ‘racial inferiors’ from conquered territories were an integral part of city life. Definitions of ‘deviancy’ became increasingly bizarre and could range from a love of jazz to an appreciation of abstract art; anything that was deemed to be anti-Aryan. Once labelled and documented, stigmatised victims were dispatched to camps with Arbeit macht frei (Work makes you Free) emblazoned over the entrance. Presented as ‘re-education centres’, they were queuing systems for the gas chambers. The barracks were given names such as TRUTHFULNESS, SELF SACRIFICE and FREEDOM which referred to a speech Himmler made to all prisoners held by the Reich: ‘There is a path to freedom. Its milestones are obedience, endeavour, honesty, order, cleanliness, sobriety, truthfulness, a sense of self sacrifice and love of the Fatherland.’

Excerpt of Himmler’s speech on the Dachau service building

Graphic identities have been used by the military for centuries but the Nazi’s bought the coordinated visual language of insignia, colour, typography and hierarchy into the public domain. Individuals in the camps were identified by badges: Work-Shy Reich, Work-Shy Municipalities, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Slavic Sub-Human, Female Race Defilers, Poles and Czechs. Homosexuals were forced to wear a pink triangles, and Jews – marked by a yellow star – were the lowest category of all. Every aspect of the brand was tightly controlled through the precise language in the guidelines: ‘The Jewish star consists of a palm-size six point star outlined in black on yellow cloth with the word JEW in black. It is to be worn visibly, sewn over the left breast of the garment.’

Prisoner identity badges

Articles in popular magazines and cinema newsreels whitewashed the camps. Gushing editorials emphasised the ‘benevolent protection’ provided for the Jews, and described Dachau as a ‘…picture of cleanliness, order, light and air.’ The ‘…guests worked gladly and willingly with good food and a roof over their heads’. Photo features showed prisoners ‘…enjoying making things in the carpentry shop’ and ‘…returning from work singing’. A documentary about the Theresienstadt Ghetto called ‘The Führer Gives a Village to the Jews’ celebrated its ‘…rich cultural life’, and featured children staging theatrical productions. As soon as the film was completed, the director, cast and crew were despatched to Auschwitz.

Theresienstadt Ghetto children’s theatre

The ‘Solution to the Jewish Situation’ was underwritten by Hitler’s statement that anyone who was ‘flawed’ led a ‘life unworthy of life’. The ‘Euthanasia Programme’ (merciful death) was rubber stamped at the Wannsee Conference when planners began to calculate the numbers of people to be exterminated and the logistics to achieve the targets. The Reich was a bureaucratic behemoth recording data in obsessive detail. They used the detached language of lists, statistics, graphs and diagrams to distance themselves from the brutal truth. Directives were saturated in ‘amtssprache’ (officialese), but the language developed to obfuscate the genocide was called ‘sprachregelung’. The sick and disabled were transported from hospitals to ‘rehabilitation centres’ in ‘charitable ambulances’ as part of the eugenics cull. Those who were not compelled by the ‘Hereditary Health Courts’ to be compulsorily sterilised were ‘resettled’, then ‘specially treated’ and finally ‘cleansed’.

Wannsee Conference list of Jewish populations

The Nazis also understood that humiliating carefully targeted people with damning words and phrases can provoke hysterical hatred across benign communities. People accused of ‘transgressions’ were paraded through the streets with hand-written boards round their necks declaring ‘I am a blood sucker’ or ‘I forbade pupils to say Heil Hitler!’ or ‘I shopped in a Jewish store’. Romantic relationships between Jews and Aryans were a crime against the ‘people’s community’. Juda Rosenberg and Elisabeth Makowiak were forced to wear placards bearing the inscriptions: ‘I am a race defiler’ and ‘I, a blonde angel, slept with this Jewboy’.

Juda Rosenberg and Elisabeth Makowiak

The Nazis didn’t just celebrate language, they destroyed it as well. ‘Ideologically unsound’ writers were shipped off to the camps and their work was publically incinerated. Bebelplatz, Berlin was a favourite location for book burnings and in 1933 (six years before the war) Joseph Goebbels prepared students for their glorious fate. ‘The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character. As young people, you already have the courage to face the fear of death, and this is the task for your generation. This is a great and symbolic deed, and from this wreckage the phoenix of a new spirit will triumphantly rise.’

Book burning – Bebelplatz, Berlin

Euphemisms are alive and well and a thriving form of flimflam. We don’t bat and eyelid at ‘collateral damage’, ‘pacification’, ‘anti-personnel device’, ‘economy with the truth’, ‘friendly fire’. ‘Extraordinary rendition’ has been elevated to ‘air cargo’ thanks to the fax from the MI6 Head of Counter Terrorism found in the abandoned offices of Moussa Koussa – General Gadhafi’s ‘Chief of Intelligence’.

MI6 fax sent to Moussa Koussa

But I give the last words to the paradoxical Captain Beatty from Fahrenheit 451, who is the most literate and articulate book burner in fiction. ‘What is there about fire that is so lovely? Its perpetual motion, the thing man wanted to invent but never did. Fire is a mystery. Scientists give us gobbledegook about friction and molecules but they don’t really know. Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences. A problem gets too burdensome, then into the furnace with it.’

‘We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last we destroy them out of discretion, and so disappears the most beautiful, the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverable for ourselves and for others.’

Goethe

Shaun Usher is the mind behind a wonderful blog called Letters of Note, a sort of cultural Mount Pleasant Sorting Office for “fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos.” The site has been going for a while, which means you now encounter a rich and varied selection of personal correspondence, from a memo about the casting of Star Trek (Wesley Snipes considered for the role of Geordi) to revealing missives and scandalous jottings from a range of writers, artists, politicians, executives and scientists.

There are some profoundly important pieces in this collection – asides, sideswipes and deeper ruminations that bring the often complex theories and personalities of individuals into the language of everyday life. I’m particularly enamoured with a letter from Albert Einstein to philosopher Erik Gutkind, who had recently written an acclaimed book, Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt. Albert lays bare his views on the subject of religious faith:

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish… For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstition. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong … have no different quality for me than all other people.

There’s a notable touch at the end, when Einstein offers (if you’ll forgive a reference from the Book of Genesis) an olive branch:

I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things.”

I might use that.

Usher includes lots of entertaining pieces where celebrities and other high profile individuals lose it on paper. Madonna to Letterman is memorably mad. There are also some deliciously unreconstructed memos to employees from the CEO of Tiger Oil, Edward ‘Tiger Mike’ Davis. Take this:

Do not speak to me when you see me. If I want to speak to you, I will do so. I want to save my throat. I don’t want to ruin it by saying hello to all of you sons-of-bitches.

I was chortling from that when I clicked to IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER. I’ll let Usher, who writes elegant introductions to each piece, set up the story:

On July 18 of 1969, as the world waited anxiously for Apollo 11 to land safely on the surface of the Moon, speechwriter William Safire imagined the worst case scenario as he expertly wrote the following sombre memo to President Nixon’s Chief of Staff, H. R. Haldeman. Its contents: a contingency plan, in the form of a speech to be read out by Nixon should astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become stranded on the moon…’

You can see and read the original memo here. It’s a remarkable speech. It also reveals something of the strange life of the speechwriter at their desk; mustering emotion ahead of time. I felt moved by Safire’s attempts to find solace and spirit in the face of potentially shattering events; by the way he draws feelings into ideas, and ideas into the words needed to anoint a tragedy that might never happen.

Tim

Half way through my DVD fest there came reports of the attempted assassination in Tucson, Arizona, of US Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, followed by news that six people had been killed by the attacker. And then I was reminded today that 2011 will mark ten years of the latest war in Afghanistan, and the consequences of – to use the term that best captures the cyclical horror of violence – the War on Terror. That brought back to me a story line in The Wire, where the FBI agents reveal they’ve been directed to ignore new drugs cases and focus on anti-terrorism. And so the police team have to fight alone in their civil war against the drugs gang.

Then my inbox pinged with a new email from these people, sharing a speech given by Robert F. Kennedy in Cleveland on April 5, 1968 – the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated. Kennedy’s words have a powerful resonance for so many reasons, partly because of his own fate, of course, and that of Lincoln (who he quotes). Partly, perhaps, because he speaks of the bonds between people yet he too was caught in the tidal drag between institution and individual; because, as well as railing against violence, he was most certainly part of a political establishment that induced conflict in the world. And partly because so much of what he describes so eloquently remains depressingly true today. I don’t have a set of specific remedies to propose in this post; I’m just thinking on what Kennedy’s words can tell us in 2011, and I thought some of you might like to read or hear what he said.

The Mindless Menace of Violence

This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity, my only event of today, to speak briefly to you about the mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives.

It is not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one – no matter where he lives or what he does – can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours.

Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr’s cause has ever been stilled by an assassin’s bullet.

No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of reason.

Whenever any American’s life is taken by another American unnecessarily – whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence – whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.

“Among free men,” said Abraham Lincoln, “there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their cause and pay the costs.”

Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire.

Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach non-violence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.

Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.

This is the breaking of a man’s spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all.

I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered.

We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this, there are no final answers.

Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.

We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others. We must admit in ourselves that our own children’s future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.

Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution.

But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.

Tim