The F-word and the R-word

Photo by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash

Dear Reader,

Ahead of the 2017 election, I sat down for an interview with Alice Weidel, who was running as the AfD’s lead candidate for the first time.

Unlike her abrasive public persona, she was polite and friendly—at least to begin with. At some point, I committed the faux pas of referring to the AfD as rechts (right-wing), at which point she corrected me, saying her party was bürgerlich.

Genuinely curious as to why she was so reluctant to use the word rechts, I asked her to explain herself—at which point she broke off the interview. To my bewilderment, she stood up and left, fuming that I was trying to put her into a box she didn’t want to be in.

It was a tough reminder that it’s not just hypersensitive Gen Zers who struggle when you ignore their preferred labels. But, what she interpreted as an affront was, in truth, an innocent question on my part.

I hadn’t been in Germany long enough to appreciate linguistic taboos. For me, links and rechts were simply two sides of the same coin—the neutral equivalents of left-wing and right-wing. What I didn’t understand was that the whole concept of rechts - not just Rechtsextrem - has been contaminated by the Nazis. As far as Weidel saw it, I was trying to imply that her party were fascists. So she decided to take offense and leave.

A more obvious example of this taboo is the word Führer. Because Hitler chose it as his official title, it’s been more or less scrubbed from the German language. Even when Führer appears as part of a longer compound word, it can trigger discomfort.

The late 20th-century literary critic Rolf Hochhuth once told a journalist he’d never gotten a driver’s licence because the word—Führerschein—contained the former dictator’s title. To which the journalist reportedly replied: “We greeted each other with ‘Heil Hitler’ in my childhood, but I never stopped eating Heilbutt (halibut).”

The word Flugzeugführer (for a person who flies a plane) has quietly disappeared in favour of Pilot, and it's increasingly common to see the English word “guide” used instead of Stadtführer.

As understandable as these aversions may be, they aren’t without their drawbacks. Especially in political communication, bending the language to avoid hurting people’s sensibilities can tie it in knots.

In an essay on proper journalistic writing, George Orwell argued that one should never use a foreign word, scientific term, or bit of jargon when an everyday English word would do. He also hated mixed metaphors. Language should be clear otherwise it loses its power to communicate the truth, he wrote.

The use of bürgerlich as a substitute for rechts is a perfect example. Coined as a political term by the CDU in the 1980s, it’s both vacuous and self-satisfied.

Literally meaning “citizenly,” those who apply it to themselves claim to speak for society as a whole. In effect, it’s supposed to conjure an image of a “good citizen”—someone who goes to church, pays taxes, and eats Sauerbraten for their Sunday lunch. Much like the word “progressive” on the left, it is moralistic rather than descriptive.

The avoidance of Führer also robs political language of its vitality. Rather than simply calling someone a Parteiführer (party leader), journalists end up using Anführer (a negative word for a gang leader), the Gallicism Parteichef, or the clunky bureaucratic Parteivorsitzende (party chairperson).

“A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine,” Orwell wrote of journalists who talk like this. “One often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy.”

Chairperson is the most common and the worst of all those tip-toeing words. A leader who thinks of himself as a chairperson doesn’t really grasp the role of chancellor. Olaf Scholz failed so spectacularly in the job because he failed to understand that leadership involves taking the public along with you and keeping your cabinet in order.

One person who did grasp how much Nazi-era taboos were warping the language was Ulrich Wickert, anchor of the Tagesthemen evening news show throughout the 1990s and 2000s.

Writing after his retirement, Wickert said that language lost its power when journalists hid behind euphemisms. He insisted on using words like Unterschicht (lower class), even though they reminded some people of the Nazi term Untermensch. He also spoke of the Vernichtung der Juden (annihilation of the Jews) rather than the abstract Greek word Holocaust. And instead of Sanktionen (sanctions), he used Strafmaßnahmen (punitive measures).

The deeper problem with taboos is that they continue to give the Nazis power over modern discourse.

Take, for example, the group of teenagers who caused a national scandal last month by choosing Holocaust-themed jokes as slogans for their school-leavers’ book. The German high school leaving exam is called the Abi, and their suggestions included Abi macht frei and NSDABI – verbrennt den Duden (the Duden is the standard German dictionary).

In most countries, this is the type of behaviour that would lead to a figurative slap across the wrist from the headmaster. But in Germany the police got involved to investigate a suspected hate crime. National newspapers agonized over whether this was further proof of a dangerous return to fascism (Rechtsruck) in German society. What got lost in the hand-wringing was the basic fact that transgression is inherently attractive—especially to teenagers.

Even at the political level, it’s often hard to tell whether people are invoking Nazi-era language because they idolise Hitler or simply because the act of transgression itself can be alluring. The AfD, for instance, has turned the banned Nazi slogan Alles für Deutschland into an unofficial motto. Members fined for using it in public often claim—unconvincingly—not to have known it was a Nazi slogan. But whether or not that’s true, the point of the provocation is less clear.

Plenty of AfD supporters seem to see the words Alles für Deutschland as a harmless expression of patriotism, and regard its ban as proof that the political establishment is priggish and anti-German. Transgressing against the taboo is more likely a statement of discontent with the current ruling class than it is an expression of a renewed fervour for the political system of the 1930s.

Thus, when Alice Weidel ran for chancellor this year, her supporters chanted out “Alice für Deutschland.” For a woman who once ended a conversation over the fact that I called her rechts, it might seem contradictory that she embraced the chants rather than asking for them to stop.

I haven’t checked. Perhaps Weidel has embraced the word rechts since we spoke. More likely, this contradiction highlights the strange effects taboos can have on a language.

---

What members are reading: