From "National Socialists" to "Nazi": history, politics, and the English language.

• Author: Znamenski, Andrei A.
• Position: Book review

The linguistic abridgements indicate an abridgement of thought which they in turn fortify and promote.

--Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

In downtown Vienna, there is a small square called the Jewish Plaza (Juden Platz). Right in the middle of this area stands a house-shaped marble monument devoted to the memory of sixty-five thousand of Austria's Jews who perished during the Holocaust. The names of various concentration camps to which these victims were relegated are carved around the foundation. On the paving in front of this symbolic "marble house" are three large inscriptions engraved in three languages: on the left German, on the right English, and in the middle Hebrew (see figures 1a, 1b, and 1c). The German one says, "Zum Gedenken an die mehr also 65.000 osterreichischen Juden, die in der Zeit von 1938 bis 1945 von den Nationalsozialisten ermordet warden" (In commemoration of more than 65,000 Austrian Jews who were lolled by the National Socialists between 1938 and 1945). When translated, so does the Hebrew one in the middle. Yet the English version reads: "In commemoration of more than 65,000 Austrian Jews who were killed by the Nazis between 1938 and 1945" (emphasis added).

Two years ago when I visited this monument for the first time, I did not pay the slightest bit of attention to that small linguistic discrepancy. However, last summer when I visited Austria again, I became intrigued with this peculiarity. To be exact, my curiosity was sparked when on the same day after visiting that site, I strolled into Thalia, Vienna's largest bookstore. Browsing shelves with social science and humanities literature, I stumbled upon a German translation of Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe, a 2009 book by the noted British historian Mark Mazower. The German edition of that book (Mazower 2009b), which has the same cover picture, is titled Hitlers Imperium: Europa unter der Herrschaft des Nationalsozialismus (Hider's empire: Europe under the National Socialism rule) (see figures 2a and 2b).

I eventually decided to look deeper into the origin of this language oddity. The first thing one notices is that when English-speaking people write and talk about Germany of the 1930s and 1940s, more often than not they routinely use the word Nazi. Thus, in English we have books and articles about Nazi economy, Nazi labor policy, Nazi geopolitics, Nazi genetics, and so forth. In contrast, when Germans refer to the same turbulent years, they usually use the term National Socialism (Nationalsozialismus). If they need to shorten it, they occasionally write NS or NSDP; the latter is an abbreviation of the long and all-embracing name for Hitler's party, the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei). In fact, Hitler and his associates never liked or used the word Nazi. They always called themselves "National Socialists." Incidentally, before 1932, when the British and American media could not yet make up their minds in which camp to place Hitler's followers, they too usually referred to them as National Socialists or sometimes simply as Hitlerites.

In the English language, the word Nazi acquired a very broad meaning. Like the term fascist, its linguistic twin expression, it moved away from its original context and entered the mainstream. Now it stays there as a loaded political smear, which people on both the left and the right use when they need to put down their opponents. Because in the West the crimes of Hitler's regime were exposed more widely and deeply than equivalent or more monstrous perpetrations committed by other modern villains, in popular perception, "Nazi" Germany became the symbol of the ultimate evil. If in a heated political debate people apply this sinister sticker to political opponents, they clearly want to drive them outside of a civilized discourse and turn them into moral outcasts. Thus, during the George W. Bush administration, especially after his Iraqi adventure, the Left frequently referred to him, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, and the rest of his neoconservative retinue as "Nazis" or "fascists." Conservative media frequently operates with the same label. For example, from the right one can hear such smear expressions as "lesbo-Nazi," "femi-Nazi," and "Green Nazi." (1) In fact, "Nazi" has already transgressed both the left and the right political vocabulary and is now firmly stuck in our colloquial usage as a dismissive reference to somebody who is stubbornly restrictive about something. Remember "grammar Nazi" or Jerry Seinfeld's famous "soup Nazi"?

However, going back to the particular context of Germany in the 1930s and the 1940s, Richard Overy, a prominent British historian of national socialism, recently wondered why we continue using the word Nazi in reference to Hitler's regime when "historians who write about the Soviet Union under Stalin do not usually describe its features as 'Commie this' or 'Commie that.'" He stresses that in English Nazi became a shorthand term that obscures more than it explains, and he cautions us that "sloppy language is an enemy to proper historical explanation" (2013, 3). Thus, Overy warns that an indiscriminate application of the word Nazi to all things German in the 1930s and the 1940s created a false perception that the entire country along with all its cultural and social institutions had been totally controlled by the National Socialist Party. He assures us that this was not the case and that "Nazi" Germany was not the omnipresent and orderly totalitarian monolith we think it was. Following the most recent scholarship on Hitler's dictatorship, he points out that there were in fact pockets of life in art, music, science, and leisure activities that were weakly or hardly affected by the dominant ideology. It appears that Overy wants to assure us that if we replaced Nazi with National Socialist, our understanding of Hitler's Germany would be somehow more nuanced. In his suggestion, one feels an unspoken assumption that the definition of National Socialism is less "totalitarian" than the definition of the sinister and loaded Nazi.

Unfortunately, Overy, who I am sure knows more about the topic than he reveals in his essay, has glossed over the origin of this abbreviation, not taking us through the entire historical and etymological maze to show how and why it emerged and entrenched itself in English. In one paragraph, he has simply summarized:

The term originated in the 1920s when contemporaries searched for some way of getting round the long-winded title of the party--the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP). It was used chiefly by the enemies of the party and never by the regime itself. The term "Nazi" or "the Nazis" had strongly negative associations; it was employed as a quick way of describing a movement popularly associated in the mind of left-wing critics outside Germany with authoritarian rule, state terror, concentration camps and an assault on the cultural values of the West. The term then, and now, was loaded. (2013, 3) Let's unpack that brief statement, for I am convinced that we are not dealing just with left-wing critics' desire to get around the long name of Hitler's party. It seems that the original choice of the term Nazi also had something to do with what George Orwell (1968) famously referred to as "politics and the English language." In order to perform that unpacking, I need to make two detours: the first one into the historiography of National Socialism, particularly into how scholars have written about its economic and social policies, and the second one into the mind of its left-wing critics outside Germany.

Winners Write History: Disentangling the Nazi from Socialist Tradition

What is intriguing about Overy's suggestion about parting with the word Nazi and shifting instead to the expression National Socialism is History Today's readers reaction when they read his essay. Many of them were not enthusiastic about his suggestion. Moreover, one of them rushed to rebuke the professor, insisting that there was no issue here. This reader assured Overy that "Nazism, when used to distinguish the German variant of fascism, is a useful word." Besides, as this reader correctly remarked, many still refer to what had been going on in Germany in the 1930s as fascism, using the latter word as a synonym for Nazi. This reader was convinced that fascism, the expression that had been peddled mostly by the Communist Left in the 1930s, was in fact more precise than "colloquial Nazism" and far better than "more misleading National Socialism." This commentator also confidently enlightened Professor Overy that Hitler's regime was "neither national nor socialist, but rather a kind of oligarchy with an obsession with 'racial' purity running up its spine" ("Comments" 2013).

What this particular reader threw to Overy's feet is very instructive. His arguments were key points taken from mainstream popular and textbook literature that still continue to inform our perceptions of Hitler's Germany. Even though for the past several decades scholars have debunked some of those household assumptions about National Socialism, their new approaches have not always trickled into mainstream media and pedagogy. Among these new findings are the regime's "progressive social policies" (2) such as professional training and expanded welfare benefits, the attempts to establish social equality for those who were included into the people's community (Volksgemanschaft) of Germans, and the emotional satisfaction many common citizens of the Third Reich felt from partaking of the "totalitarian" ideological, economic, and social system. (3) The mistaken notion of Hitler's regime as an "oligarchy," which allegedly imposed itself on the innocent "virgin" populace and which oppressed the majority of Germans, still resonates with many writers of popular literature both on the left and on the right.

Here I am particularly...