Research background

The aim of this long-term project is to investigate the ideological and linguistic influence of a number of nationalistically-inclined and/or overtly anti-Semitic figures on German propaganda before and during the First World War, and, subsequently, on the discourse of nationalist thinkers and politicians in the period leading up to the foundation of the Third Reich, not least that of Adolf Hitler.

The initial aim of the project will be to analyze the discourses of a number of key figures in German politics, philosophy and education during the late nineteenth century, most particularly Otto von Bismarck, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Theodor Fritsch, Wilhelm Marr, Heinrich von Treitschke and Richard Wagner. These discourses will be compared with later journalistic and political texts of the type that may have influenced public opinion in Germany prior to and during the First World War and, ultimately, the discourse of National Socialism. Cheap war propaganda pamphlets, by such writers as Paul Rohrbach, as well as Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s ``Kriegsaufsätze’’ (war essays), are of particular interest, as it is likely that Adolf Hitler and other National Socialists will have read such widely available literature.

The reasons for choosing the period 1871-1924 are as follows:

Following German unification in 1871, the first overtly anti-Semitic political parties were founded and Otto Boeckel became the first anti-Semitic member of Parliament. In 1886, the Deutsche Antisemitische Vereinigung was founded. According to Hannah Arendt (2004), German, and in particular Prussian, anti-Semitism coincided with the advent of new types of nationalism as well as imperialism during the final third of the nineteenth century (Arendt 2004, 55).
The end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century was the period in German history when blood ties and ethnicity became central to nationalist ideology. This was a time when Germany as an industrialized society was in the process of cutting its last links with the pre-modern social system (Geulen 2004, 12f.). Geulen sees this period of nationalism as one in which there was an attempt to reconcile the notion of a nation as a political “Wahlverwandtschaft” (chosen relationship) with the former notion of a nation consisting of people related by blood, and an attempt to found the nation on theories of race and essentialism. Related to this was the development of a biopolitical principle of politics, namely of politics as a struggle for survival and “Rassenkampf” (racial struggle) (Geulen, 310).
1924 has been chosen as the cut-off point for the present study as it predates Hitler's writing of Mein Kampf. This is because the project is chiefly interested in discourse which may have influenced Mein Kampf and later National Socialist discourse, although the conference invites contributions which may include analysis of discourse up to 1945.

Objectives

With the assistance of a research assistant, to develop an existing archive of primary historical sources. The archive will include scanned articles from newspapers and journals, and political pamphlets.
To create a project website for the publication of the project archive, project news and events, and work in progress.
To host a conference on pre-1945 nationalist and anti-Semitic propaganda.
To found a study network which will continue to meet regularly after the Leverhulme-funded project has finished.
To produce a review of research into nationalist literature and political propaganda for the period 1871-1924.
To create an annotated bibliography of newspapers and journals for the period 1871-1924.
To use existing research methodologies for a critical analysis of a selection of primary texts and answer specific research questions as follows:
1. To what extent did the nationalist and/or anti-Semitic discourses of the key figures listed above make use of the following discourse features:
  1. the construction of Feindbilder (images of the enemy) using rhetorical devices such as epithets, personification and metaphors?
  2. the construction of a common political and cultural past?
  3. the narration of a common political and cultural future?
  4. the narration of a common national identity?
  5. strategies of perpetuation, transformation and destruction? (see further under Methodologies below)
2. To what extent were the features listed under a. above duplicated in the political rhetoric responsible for moulding public opinion prior to and during the First World War, for example in contemporary journalism and the war essays of Houston Stewart Chamberlain?
3. To what extent did the discourses analyzed under a. and b. above influence early National Socialist Writers?
To analyze Heinrich von Treitschke’s lectures on German politics (Politik, 1898) in order to establish the feasibility of the view, postulated in 1914 by Joseph McCabe, that Treitschke helped shape the German national consciousness during the early part of the twentieth century. If this view is correct, Treitschke’s ideal of Prussian statehood fuelled and consolidated the nationalist sentiments that made the First World War possible. This was to a great degree due to his influence on the large numbers of politicians, teachers and journalists who had attended his lecture or read his Politik.

Significance of the project

With the exception of Christoph Cobet’s analysis of the anti-Semitic discourse of Eugen Dühring, there has been very little detailed linguistic analysis of the political and philosophical discourse of the late nineteenth century (von Polenz 1972, 165-167; 1999, 538-541). The same is true for analyses of propaganda for the period leading up to and during the First World War, although the last decade has seen stirrings of interest in the period of the war itself (see, for example, Wolfgang Hünig’s monograph on British and German cartoons, Martin Wengeler 2005 analysis of early “Kriegsbotschaften” (justifications of war), and Anja Lobenstein-Reichmann's 2008 monograph on the language of Houston Stewart Chamberlain). As Peter von Polenz points out, conventional studies of German political texts have rarely transcended the lexeme as the chief unit of analysis. The purpose of the present project is to go beyond the word using the tools of Critical Discourse Analysis (see the section on Methods below). In her 2006 monograph, The Language of Violence: Hitler's Mein Kampf, , Felicity Rash analyzed sample texts from Jahn’s Von deutschem Volkstum (1810) and Chamberlain’s Arische Weltanschauung (1905) as well as Wilhelm II’s speech An das deutsche Volk (1914) and a sample of popular journalism. She examined lexis, syntax and rhetorical figures in order to illustrate the similarities between the language and imagery of Mein Kampf and that of existing published nationalistic and anti-Semitic discourse. This analysis, although not central to the purpose of the book and therefore limited in scope, demonstrated that more substantial studies of a similar nature would be rewarding.

As Martin Wengeler (2005, 211) confirms, there is a need for more analysis of late 19th century and early 20th discourse with the particular aim of investigating the development of mentalities and attitudes of German nationalists (Wengeler 2005, 10f.). In respect of the same era, Christian Geulen writes of a gap in research into the relationship between the discourses of racial politics, nationalism and imperialism, a gap which he has only gone a small way towards closing. He makes it clear that there is a need for research into the notion of politics as a fight for survival, in part a “Rassenkampf” (struggle between races), and into the view of the German nation as a community held together by blood ties as well as political choices (Geulen 2004, 310).

Methodology

The project will adopt a critical linguistic methodology as its primary tool. Critical Linguistics is concerned with the way in which power is mediated through discourse; it examines how language can be manipulated for political purposes and ultimately aims to raise reader-awareness of power relations. The theories and methods of Critical Linguistics, originating with scholars such as Roger Fowler, Gunther Kress and Robert Hodge, and developed as Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) by Norman Fairclough, Ruth Wodak, Teun van Dijk, Paul Chilton and others, have been employed since the 1980s largely to analyze journalism, political speeches and institutional discourse of the period following the Second World War. The substantial results of Wodak’s research in particular suggest that similar explorations of the nationalist literature of earlier eras would be valuable (Wodak et al. 1999, Martin and Wodak 2003). The “Vienna School” discourse-historical method associated with Wodak and her colleagues, which traces the intertextual history of linguistic features and arguments, has broadened the scope of CDA to make it suitable as a model for the present project. Wodak et al.'s attention to the dialectical relationship between discourse and the social and political reality within which they are embedded will also be emulated.

The three main dimensions of analysis identified by Wodak et al. (1999) and used to examine the construction of national identity in discourse will serve as a provisional template during the initial examinations of primary data. These three dimensions are as follows:

A matrix of thematic contents, including the linguistic construction of a homo nationalis and a homo externus, the narration of a common political past and future, the linguistic construction of a common culture, and the linguistic construction of a `national body’.
Strategies employed in the discursive construction of a national identity:
1. Constructive strategies, e.g. the construction of an image or identity.
2. Strategies of perpetuation, e.g. the justification of the status quo ante.
3. Strategies of transformation, e.g. changing a status quo.
4. Destructive strategies, e.g. demolishing an established image.
The linguistic means employed in the discursive formation of national identity, including personal reference, spatial reference and temporal reference, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and personification (Wodak et al. 1999, 30-47; Martin and Wodak 2003, 121f.). The last four of these linguistic means form a link between CDA and Cognitive Linguistics (on the relationship between CDA and Cognitive Linguistics see O’Halloran 2003).

The value of a Cognitive Linguistic approach to the analysis of political texts has recently been demonstrated by Andreas Musolff (2003, 2004) and Jonathan Charteris-Black (2004), and their approaches will inform the methods adopted for the present project. Musolff’s corpus analysis of metaphor scenarios in political discourse (e.g. THE EU IS A FAMILY) demonstrates how political metaphors are `integral aspects of argumentative reasoning, i.e. reasoning which typically aims to prove a contested issue and thus also legitimize a certain course of action’ (2004, 32). Charteris-Black has developed a system of Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) which he illustrates using a variety of corpora. He analyzes the pragmatic dimension of metaphor `in terms of its ideological and rhetorical components’ (p.2). Charteris-Black sees CMA as connected with CDA on the basis that metaphor use can constitute a `conscious linguistic choice that conceals underlying social processes’ (p 30).

The project will also, where appropriate, make use of the methods of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) devised by Partington et al. CADS combines Corpus Linguistics (CL) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), more specifically Wodak's Discourse Historical Approach (DHA), and facilitates the combination, as appropriate, of both quantitative and qualitative techniques of analysis: `the quantification of the quality' of texts and the `quantification of bias' in texts (Baker et al., 297). Baker et al. characterize CADS as a synergy between CDA and CL or a `cross-pollination' which benefits both CDA and CL (Baker et al., 274).

A combination of the methods detailed in this section will produce a linguistic hermeneutics (Sprachhermeneutik) as developed by Fritz Hermanns in 2003 and recommended by Martin Wengeler. The project will be conducted in the spirit of Hermanns’ desire that linguistics should contribute to other sciences and be socially relevant in a way that he believes German linguistics has hitherto failed to achieve. The ambition of both Wengeler and Hermanns has been for linguistics to become a cultural science in the sense that, through knowledge of the connection between linguistic and social behaviours, it may enable a broad understanding of human actions, their causes and effects, and the motives and reasoning behind them (Hermanns 2003, 136).