The Language of Nazi Genocide

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.

• Introduction; 1. 'We are all Germans; why then ask for religion …': cultural identity, language, and Weimar pluralism, 1928–32; 2. Towards the 'racial and social boundaries between Germans and Jews are to be strictly drawn …': dictatorship building and the process of Nazifying language, 1933; 3. Towards the eradication of the 'impossible, untenable category of 'German Jews'': enforcing and contesting racial difference, 1935–8; 4. 'The Jewess' attempted to 'state a case on her decent': linguistic violence as part of genocide, 1941–5; 5. 'We are not bad Jews, because we believe we are good and true Germans …': another beginning and persisting difference, 1945–8; Conclusion; Appendix.

'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