Description: In the Nazi genocide of European Jews, words preceded, accompanied, and made mass murder possible. Using a multilayered approach to connect official language to everyday life, historian Thomas Pegelow Kaplan analyzes the role of language in genocide. This study seeks to comprehend how the perpetrators constructed difference, race, and their perceived enemies; how Nazi agencies communicated to the public through the nation's press; and how Germans of Jewish ancestry received, contested, and struggled for survival and self against remarkable odds. The Language of Nazi Genocide covers the historical periods of the late Weimar Republic, the Nazi regime, and early postwar Germany. However, by addressing the architecture of conceptual separation between groups and the means by which social aggression is disseminated, this study offers a model for comparative studies of linguistic violence, hate speech, and genocide in the modern world.
Brief description: Thomas Pegelow Kaplan is currently Assistant Professor of Modern European History at Davidson College. He has also taught at Grinnell College and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he received his PhD. He was awarded a Miles Lerman Center for the Study of Jewish Resistance Fellowship by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and a Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. His articles have appeared in Central European History, Contemporary European History and Zeitgeschichte.
Review Quotes: "A sensitive, sophisticated, and rigorous analysis of the linguistic violence that accompanied and enabled the Shoah. Pegelow Kaplan uses a vast and diverse array of sources, from press directives to newspapers, diaries, and interviews with survivors, to reveal how, between 1928 and 1948, laws, institutions, and individuals interacted to produce and sometimes contest the Nazi categories of 'German' and 'Jew.' In the process, he speaks in profound and compelling ways to key questions in the study of the Holocaust, about continuity, antisemitism, 'ordinary Germans, ' and Jewish resistance. Especially valuable is Pegelow Kaplan's consideration of all Germans of Jewish ancestry and his keen ear for the desperation and ingenuity with which people defined as outsiders and targeted for destruction struggled, using everything they had to save their families, their lives, and their selves." - Doris L. Bergen, Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies, University of Toronto