| Popis: |
This chapter has two sections, focusing on the periods 1949–1989 and 1990–. The retrospective discourse on language and Nazism is increasingly embedded in the politics of the present, evident in contestations of “Nazi language” and contested instrumentalizations of the Nazi past for current political advantage. The first section reviews the delayed process of ‘coming to terms with the past’ (Vergangenheitsbewaltigung) in the late 1950s, the use of “Nazi comparisons” (Stotzel) in the Cold War division of Germany, and the argument on method (mainly between Sternberger and von Polenz) surrounding the “Lexicon of the ‘Unmensch’” in the 1960s, which marked a socio-pragmatic turn in the German academy. The second section discusses the continued contestations of ‘tainted language’ and instrumentalizations of the Nazi past, also abroad (for example, in British Euro-sceptic discourse), the contribution of “pragmatized lexica” to the academic discourse, the persistence of linguistic taboos, and analyses of new nationalist discourses in post-unification Germany. |
