The Language of Nazi Genocide: Linguistic Violence and the Struggle of Germans of Jewish Ancestry. By Thomas Pegelow Kaplan. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2009. Pp. xv+296+Index 297–303. Cloth $80.00. ISBN 978-0-521-88866-0.

摘要

That the word Judentum was negatively construed in modern Germany is arngiven. The early studies of Jacob Toury and Jacob Katz on the emergence ofrnDie Judenfrage, Dietz Bering’s Der Name als Stigma, and Paul Lawrence Rose’srnRevolutionary Anti-Semitism from Kant to Wagner all make this point. In hisrnseminal study of Die Weltbu ¨hne, Istvan Deak commented that this phenomenonrnextended to the opponents of anti-Semitism as well: “Jewishness indeed wasrndetermined not so much by one’s enemies as by one’s friends, and it was arnsource of humiliation, for all the hypocritical assertions of the courts of thernWeimar Republic to the contrary Jew was a pejorative word” (Germany’s Left-rnWing Intellectuals, p. 25). But Thomas Pegelow Kaplan has added two importantrndimensions to this inquiry. First, he quantitatively tabulates the appearances ofrnthe terms “Jews” and “Germans” in four principal journals: Vo ¨lkischer Beobachterrn(VB), Frankfurter Zeitung (FZ), CV-Zeitung, and Ju ¨dische Rundschau (JR). Second,rnhe uses diary and memoir literature, both published and archival, to impart arnpersonal element to what had generally been a discussion of political rhetoricrnalone. Pegelow Kaplan traces the use of these terms over a twenty-yearrnperiod (1928-1948) and persuasively shows the way key categories of German-rnness and Jewishness changed over time in their frequency and in their meaning.