ABSTRACT
In his book LTI: The Language of the Third Reich the philologist Victor Klemperer describes the slow and steady transformation of the everyday use of language in Nazi Germany. He shows how Hitler’s Nazism took hold on the lives of people not so much through Nazi propaganda – the many explicit speeches, articles, posters, flags and pamphlets – but through their mechanical and unconscious adoption of single words.
Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the masses through single words, idioms, and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously.
(2000 [1947]: 30, translation JD)