The Intellectual Faces a Totalitarian State

The writings Victor Klemperer produced during his time under the Third Reich would seem to today be unjustly, and not at all innocently, neglected. Still, those who do remember them recall them as a portrait of life in Nazi Germany such as few had, the perspective of a German Jew who, because of various personal circumstances, if deprived of his home, job and career, forced to wear a yellow star, perform forced labor in a factory and live in segregated quarters while subject to controls, harassment and abuse of many kinds did not leave the country, go into Anne Frank-style hiding, or put into a concentration camp but rather, and accordingly had a chance to observe "ordinary" German life in Dresden until the city's aerial destruction, and then outside it all the way down to V-E Day. Keeping a diary through it all (I Will Bear Witness), he also, reflecting a sensitivity to language such as all too few members of his profession (professor of language and literature) have, he recorded along with his experiences numerous observations of and reflections on the evolution--or rather, devolution--of the German language as seen in official usage and everyday life under Nazi rule.

Of course, in doing so Klemperer wrote of the saturation of the German language with nationalistic, racist, Anti-Semitic, militaristic reference and evocation. More subtly he remarked the tendency of the Nazis, for all their reactionary romanticism of the past, and their idealization of soil, tradition, the rural world, to technological language consistent with a vision of the country as a great machine under their control. More subtle still was perhaps the most striking theme of his analysis, the way in which the Third Reich's language endeavored to stultify the critical faculties, and in doing a thorough job of that, stultify the intellect more generally. Hence the Nazi exaltation of the physical over the mental, and feeling over thinking, not least in its redefinition of heroism. As Klemperer observes the Nazis seemed to cast aside the idea of the hero as someone who did something for others in their fixation on remarkable physical deeds, a tendency exemplified for him by their cult of sports and the sports hero, and especially the race car driver--hardly an image of self-sacrifice for a common good! It was evident, too, in their exaltation of "faith," a word Klemperer seems to have got really sick of hearing, especially given that the faith so many spoke of was faith in the Fuhrer (the faith in whom really could seem religious given Hitler's quasi-secular deliberate imitation of the language, rituals, symbols, archetypes of the Christian faith to exploit the religious feeling of the believing part of the German public on behalf of the party, its state, its ideology, its causes), while they made "fanaticism" into a virtue, evident not just in the propensity for physicality over intellect and faith over cognition, but also the propensity for bombastic language, characterized by superlatives, evident in how every deed of the Leader was "historic"; by an obsession with "breaking records"; by a penchant for little-understood foreign words that impress the ignorant more than their entirely adequate, well-understood native equivalents ever could have.

Klemperer was also highly sensitive to how even the critically-minded, immersed in the toxic atmosphere created by this corruption of the language, the culture, could find themselves touched by its insidious influence. While it is a cliché of anti-intellectualism that the intellectual lives "in an ivory tower," or "up in the clouds," Klemperer tells us that in fact "a part of every intellectual’s soul belongs to the people," with all the vulnerability that goes with that. In spite of his "awareness of being lied to," and his "critical attentiveness," he knows that "at some point the printed lie will get the better of me when it attacks from all sides and is queried by fewer and fewer around me and finally by no one at all."

As one whom life disabused of many a foolish illusion, he saw all too clearly that intellectual life and the broader public need each other--a lesson those who see any positive role for the life of the mind would do well to heed. Say what one will, those whose principal talent, task, contribution to society is in thinking can hardly make that contribution very well for very long without the interest and support from those who are not intellectuals of the same type themselves, or even intellectuals in any conventional sense, but can nonetheless appreciate what they do--all as that in turn means that the intellectual has a duty to society more broadly, not least in helping others see and understand the world around them. Alas, it is a lesson that the enemies of both intellectuals and the general public have heeded better than they, doing all they can to alienate intellectuals and the general public from each other, with one obvious result in a society where those who actually hold power persuade much of the public that the elite consists not of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, of Big Oil and Big Media, of the health care-industrial complex and the military-industrial complex and the tech-industrial complex, of billionaires and their Beltway fixers and the Yes-I-Knew-Jeffrey-Epstein-But-I-Had-No-Idea-What-All-Those-Girls-Were-Doing-There-Honest club, but college professors barely making ends meet, or simply people who whatever their occupation happen to "like books"--and at the same time convincing the professors that the working people with whom they have so much more in common than is generally acknowledged are a pack of Know-Nothing hardhats whose instincts naturally put them on the side of their persecutors, such that the intellectuals' warnings about the danger to them both go ignored, and the isolated intellectual themselves all too often succumbs to the lies of the powerful.