ABSTRACT
The symbiotic relationship between language and reality is perhaps at its most complex when language is used for political ends (see Hodge and Kress 1993). In such contexts, it is almost impossible to disentangle language, the language user (both enunciator and recipient) and ideology. Language both creates and is created by a political structure, mirroring and mediating at the same time. Our selection of a passage on the topic of race, therefore, is not simply based on its centrality to a regime which became ‘the first state in world history whose dogma and practice was racism’ (Burleigh and Wippermann 1991: 23). Rather, the notion of race in Nazi ideology is ‘predicated on the negation of the individual’, with individuals ‘viewed as tokens of the category to which they belong’ (Townson 1992: 135), and this process of de-individualization is inextricably bound up with the way in which Nazi language functions. In this and countless other texts of the period, language articulates the ideology of racial community whilst simultaneously creating a community of uniform recipients.
