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A review by penguinna
The Language of the Third Reich: LTI--Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist's Notebook by Victor Klemperer
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
5.0
Originally, I come from a country where freedom of speech is nonexistent. The situation worsened significantly after this country invaded another almost two years ago: the already fragile state of freedoms and rights has now reached a critical level.
Currently residing in Europe, I am grateful for the complete freedom to read and express myself without any sense of threat. Therefore, I have decided to dig deeper into the topic of propaganda to figure out how it really works. I wanted to understand how it convinces people that war can be righteous and even sacred, and how it makes others think someone from a different nationality or religion doesn't deserve to live. Therefore, I decided to go to the extreme and read about the propaganda language in Nazi Germany, or the so-called Third Reich.
LTI, or Lingua Tertii Imperii, is written by a German Jewish professor of philology in Dresden, who faced the horrors of Holocaust firsthand. This book is based on his personal diaries from 1933 to 1945 which he had to hide to avoid being consigned to a concentration camp.
I expected that there would be similarities in war propaganda across different nations and historical periods, but I was unprepared for the actual extent of them. I had to annotate almost every page to use the phrases later in my research. Language is power, and we do not even notice how it affects us, our daily expressions, and, therefore, our views and opinions.
“Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms, and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously.”
Full of examples and explanations based on the real-life situations, LTI by Klemperer is a very tough read that is a must for every linguistics and philology student or anyone who is interested in the insides of propaganda.
More reviews by me on instagram: @penguinna_books
Currently residing in Europe, I am grateful for the complete freedom to read and express myself without any sense of threat. Therefore, I have decided to dig deeper into the topic of propaganda to figure out how it really works. I wanted to understand how it convinces people that war can be righteous and even sacred, and how it makes others think someone from a different nationality or religion doesn't deserve to live. Therefore, I decided to go to the extreme and read about the propaganda language in Nazi Germany, or the so-called Third Reich.
LTI, or Lingua Tertii Imperii, is written by a German Jewish professor of philology in Dresden, who faced the horrors of Holocaust firsthand. This book is based on his personal diaries from 1933 to 1945 which he had to hide to avoid being consigned to a concentration camp.
I expected that there would be similarities in war propaganda across different nations and historical periods, but I was unprepared for the actual extent of them. I had to annotate almost every page to use the phrases later in my research. Language is power, and we do not even notice how it affects us, our daily expressions, and, therefore, our views and opinions.
“Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms, and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously.”
Full of examples and explanations based on the real-life situations, LTI by Klemperer is a very tough read that is a must for every linguistics and philology student or anyone who is interested in the insides of propaganda.
More reviews by me on instagram: @penguinna_books