Nazi-Deutsch/Nazi-German: An English Lexicon of the Language of the Third Reich

Maybe you are a professor of German culture. Or maybe, as a hobby, you research and reenact the major historical jargons of Europe. Or maybe you’re already thinking about this year’s Halloween costume and have considered dressing as a Nazi, so that everyone at the party can smile uncomfortably upon your entrance and then, several drinks later, finally take you aside and tell you just how far beyond the pale you have wandered this year—this, as you gaze across the room at the two smiling Maos, welcome in the fold.

If any of the above is true, this wonderful bilingual glossary, Nazi-Deutsche/Nazi-German: An English Lexicon of the Language of the Third Reich, might be just the thing for you. Written by Robert Michael and Karin Doerr, this surprisingly manageable volume provides all you need to know about the various slang words, bureaucratic nomenclatures, and military terms of art the Nazis bandied about during their murderous rampage. It will surely help you to interpret those obscure archival documents you’ve stumbled across, or at last to make sense of those letters grandma saved from great great uncle Wilhelm, or even, come October, to make your own guttural pronouncements one measure more authentic.

Having written their reference clear through the Zs, Michael and Doerr can now, unlike most lexicographers, rest in the comfort of a task completed. Whereas most dictionaries of modern language will demand constant revision and expansion to keep abreast of changing verbiage, the language of the Nazis is more or less done with evolving. It may be fitting, then, that the authors introduce their lexicon with two definitive essays on the ideology of the jargon of the Third Reich. Their passion for the subject really comes through in the essay titles: “Nazi-Deutsch: An Ideological Language of Exclusion, Domination, and Annihilation,” by Doerr, and “The Tradition of Anti-Jewish Language,” by Michael. It should come as no surprise that the ideological gist of Nazi jargon is rather an open-and-shut case, but the authors make the assessment especially cutting and clear. As Doerr puts it at the start of her essay, “German, as it changed during the Third Reich period, represents a deviation from human and humanistic language development and a violation of civil interaction and even the meaning of speech.” The sinister black and red cladding drives home this point: Nazi language barely even qualifies as a mode of human communication. We the humanists spend plenty of time learning that language is a pure texture of ideology and difference, but few are the occasions for summing up an entire lexicon in two tidy essays. Michael and Doerr bring off their anti-Nazi pronouncements with rare verve and aplomb.

Cent mille milliards de poèmes

In English, the title translates to One hundred thousand billion poems, or else One hundred million million poems, or else One hundred trillion poems. The French have a crazy way of expressing numbers. (For instance, the series of quantities 4, 20, 9, 89, 10, 9, 19, 99, 96, 80, 16 would be said aloud as quatre, vingt, neuf, quatre-vingt-neuf, dix, neuf, dix-neuf, quatre-vingt-dix-neuf, quatre-vingt-seize, quatre-vingt, seize. Apparently with enough wine you can pronounce a hyphen.) In the case of this particular book, however, such combinatory flexibility is quite apt, for the author Raymond Queneau here proves his mastery at leveraging the power of recombination.

I don’t know much about poetry, but when I imagine a book of one hundred trillion poems, I imagine a very thick book. As we read in the postface by François Le Lionnais, who assisted Queneau, “The work you are holding in your hands represents, itself alone, a quantity of text far greater than everything man has written since the invention of writing, including popular novels, business letters, diplomatic correspondence, private mail, rough drafts thrown in the wastebasket, and graffiti.” In fact, at one poem per standard 20-pound sheet of paper, my calculations suggest the book would be approximately 6 million miles thick. (Thanks to the electronic god-brain Wolfram Alpha for confirming my math.) But no! Though rather wide and tall, Queneau’s book isn’t very thick at all:

How, you ask, does the genius Queneau do it? The magic happens with ten sonnets and a pair of scissors. Each sonnet not only follows the same rhyme scheme, but bears the same rhyming sounds in the same places—so that one can replace, say, the final line of one poem with the final line of another, without breaking any formal rules. Cutting slits on either side of each line of each poem yields a fanfare of recombinable lines, easy to rearrange into one hundred trillion possible sonnets:

In his introductory “Mode d’emploi”—a term that would resonate through the OuLiPoan tradition that this book, in 1961, set rolling—Queneau says that his little book allows “everyone to compose” these trillions of sonnets, and that he hopes his little sonnet-machine will always produce poems with a formal and grammatical regularity, as well as “a theme and a continuity” to hold them together. There is a gratifying viscosity, a density in moving through this thicket of sonnet material—quite like getting chased by tigers through a bamboo forest:

As with so many strange books, this one proves difficult to handle. My fingers are so accustomed to the wholeness of the sheet, they become trembly and useless with these strips splaying themselves out everywhere. Happily, Gordon Dow has produced a more user-friendly online version of the original text, and Beverly Charles Rowe provides multiple digital versions in English. The internet seems as apt a destination as any for this strange book; scholars of new media writing have long seen Queneau’s many sonnets as a precursor to the textual combinatorics that hypertext and related technologies enable. (Indeed, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort provide an extremely limited excerpt of Queneau’s book—percentage-wise, probably the smallest excerpt ever—in their wonderful The New Media Reader.) But when the day is done, there’s nothing quite like physically holding the uncanny slimness of this very big, very strange book. You can get such a “bookbound” copy here.

Chinese Periodicals in the Library of Congress: A Bibliography

I found a finding aid. But this book, for me, is all about its setting. I discovered it sitting on a counter-top some months ago, and there it has sat, all day, every day, since then. This is a huge book to leave lying around:

The counter-top in question is in the Library of Congress, at one end of a vast reading room now repurposed with cubicles for librarians to do their bibliological thang. The two compilers (as they call themselves on the cover page) are Han-Chu Huang and David H.G. Hsu, who brought out the book in 1988. In Huang’s case, the first hits on a Google search of his name refer to this very bibliography—but just looking at the thing, we don’t exactly need Google to recognize it as a substantial project. David H.G. Hsu, for his part, is not to be confused with the Wharton Business School professor by the same name. Different guy. Like so many of the strangest books, this one does what it promises. We get 814 carefully wrought pages of Chinese periodicals in the Library of Congress:

Given this book’s sheer inertia, I had thought it safe to assume it never got much play. After all, here it was: a book apparently produced by two employees of the Library of Congress, published with funding from the Library of Congress, whose sole purpose was to list certain holdings of the Library of Congress, sitting in perhaps the only room in the entire world where people might have regular occasion to use it—a room, that is, in the Library of Congress where other employees of the Library of Congress spend their days sorting and stacking and listing and distributing the holdings of the Library of Congress—and yet it had sat apparently untouched for weeks. One would have expected it to get passed around like the cup at a one-cup kegger. Imagine my delight, then, to see the Internet positively brimming with references to this reference. You can even buy onefor yourself, for not that much money, should you become so inclined.