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ABSTRACT
By applying methods of cognitive metaphor theory, Jaworska examines metaphorical scenarios employed in the discourse of anti-Slavism, which featured prominently in radical nationalist propaganda in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century. She does so by analysing metaphorical expressions used to refer to the Polish population living in the eastern provinces of Prussia, in the so-called Ostmark. Her article is based on an analysis of a range of pamphlets and newspaper articles written by some of the leading figures of two nationalist organizations: the Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband) and the Eastern Marches Society (Ostmarkenverein). The main research questions it addresses are: What kind of metaphoric scenarios were used to depict the Polish minority, and to what extent were the metaphorical patterns of anti-Slavic imagery similar to those employed in the antisemitic propaganda of the Nazi era? Is there a discursive continuity between the radical nationalism of imperial Germany and the National Socialism of the Third Reich at the level of metaphorical scenarios? Ultimately, Jaworska attempts to contribute to a better understanding of the cognitive mechanisms underlying radical and essentially racist attitudes.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Professors Felicity Rash and Andreas Musolff for their constructive comments on an early version of this study. A version was presented at the joint conference of the Forum for Germanic Language Studies, the Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference, and Studies in the History of the English Language held in Banff (Canada) in 2009. The presentation was supported by a grant from the British Academy.
Notes
1Peter von Polenz, Deutsche Sprachgeschichte vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. III: 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter 1999), 548.
2Cornelia Schmitz-Berning, Vokabular des Nationalsozialismus (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter 1998).
3Andreas Musolff, ‘What role do metaphors play in racial prejudice? The function of antisemitic imagery in Hitler's Mein Kampf’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 41, no. 1, 2007, 21–43; Felicity Rash, The Language of Violence: Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf (New York: Peter Lang 2006).
4Roger Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League, 1886–1914 (Boston: Allen and Unwin 1984); Peter Walkenhorst, Nation, Volk, Rasse: Radikaler Nationalismus im deutschen Kaiserreich 1890–1914 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht 2007).
5Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German, 7.
6Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German; Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Nationalismus: Geschichte, Formen, Folgen (Munich: Beck 2001); Walkenhorst, Nation, Volk, Rasse.
7Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German, 9.
8Wehler, Nationalismus, 83. All translations, unless other stated, are by the author.
9Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German, 82–6.
10Walkenhorst, Nation, Volk, Rasse.
11Walkenhorst, Nation, Volk, Rasse, 130.
12Walkenhorst, Nation, Volk, Rasse, 96–7.
13Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso 2006).
14Lera Boroditsky and Michael Ramscar, ‘The roles of body and mind in abstract thought’, Psychological Science, vol. 13, no. 2, 2002, 185–9; Paul H. Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky, ‘Metaphors we think with: the role of metaphor in reasoning’, PLoS ONE, vol. 6, no. 2, 2011, 1–11.
15Thibodeau and Boroditsky, ‘Metaphors we think with’.
16Lera Boroditsky and Michael Ramscar, ‘The roles of body and mind in abstract thought’, Psychological Science, vol. 13, no. 2, 2002, 185–9; Paul H. Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky, ‘Metaphors we think with: the role of metaphor in reasoning’, PLoS ONE, vol. 6, no. 2, 2011, 1.
17Lera Boroditsky and Michael Ramscar, ‘The roles of body and mind in abstract thought’, Psychological Science, vol. 13, no. 2, 2002, 185–9; Paul H. Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky, ‘Metaphors we think with: the role of metaphor in reasoning’, PLoS ONE, vol. 6, no. 2, 2011, 1.
18For overviews, see, for example, Konrad Ehlich (ed.), Sprache im Faschismus (Frankfurt on Main: Suhrkamp 1989); and Michael Kinne and Johannes Schwitalla, Sprache im Nationalsozialismus (Heidelberg: Julius Groos 1994).
19See, for example, Ruth Wodak, ‘Das Ausland and antisemitic discourse: the discursive construction of the Other’, in Stephen Harold Riggins (ed.), The Language and Politics of Exclusion: Others in Discourse (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage 1997), 65–87; Ruth Wodak, Rudolf de Cillia, Martin Reisigl and Karin Liebhart, The Discursive Construction of National Identity, trans. from the German by Angelika Hirsch, Richard Mitten and J. W. Unger, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2009); Margret Jäger and Siegfried Jäger, Gefährliche Erbschaften: Die schleichende Restauration rechten Denkens (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag 1999); and Ruth Wodak, ‘The discourse-historical approach’, in Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (eds), Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (London: Sage 2001), 63–94.
20Theo van Leeuwen, ‘Critical discourse analysis’, in Keith Brown (ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd edn, 14 vols (Amsterdam, London and Boston: Elsevier 2006), III, 290–4 (290).
21Central to CDA is the concept of ‘discourse’ understood as ‘a complex bundle of simultaneous and sequential interrelated linguistic acts, which manifest themselves within and across the social fields of action as thematically interrelated semiotic, oral or written tokens, very often as “texts”’ (Wodak, ‘The discourse-historical approach’, 66). Discourses are not fixed units but open and hybrid systems that evolve as a result of historical processes.
22Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl and Liebhart, The Discursive Construction of National Identity; Jäger and Jäger, Gefährliche Erbschaften.
23Stephen Harold Riggins, ‘The rhetoric of othering’, in Stephen Harold Riggins (ed.), The Language and Politics of Exclusion (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage 1997), 1–30 (9).
24Wodak, ‘Das Ausland and anti-semitic discourse’, 74.
25Paul Chilton, ‘Missing links in mainstream CDA: modules, blends and the critical instinct’, in Ruth Wodak and Paul Chilton (eds), A New Agenda in (Critical) Discourse Analysis: Theory, Methodology and Interdisciplinarity (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins 2005), 19–53.
26Paul Chilton, ‘Missing links in mainstream CDA: modules, blends and the critical instinct’, in Ruth Wodak and Paul Chilton (eds), A New Agenda in (Critical) Discourse Analysis: Theory, Methodology and Interdisciplinarity (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins 2005), 23.
27See, for example, Paul Chilton, ‘Manipulation, memes and metaphors: the case of Mein Kampf’, in Louis de Saussure and Peter Schulz (eds), Manipulation and Ideologies in the Twentieth Century: Discourse, Language, Mind (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins 2005), 15–43; Rash, The Language of Violence; Musolff, ‘What role do metaphors play in racial prejudice?’.
28Seana Coulson, ‘Metaphor and conceptual blending’, in Brown (ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, I, 32–9 (33).
29George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1980).
30Thibodeau and Boroditsky, ‘Metaphors we think with’.
31Jonathan Charteris-Black, Politicians and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave 2005), 13–20.
32Chilton, ‘Manipulation, memes and metaphors’.
33Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, ‘Blending as a central process of grammar’, in Adele E. Goldberg (ed.), Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language (Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications 1996), 113–30 (113).
34Chilton, ‘Manipulation, memes and metaphors’.
35Musolff, ‘What role do metaphors play in racial prejudice?’.
36Musolff, ‘What role do metaphors play in racial prejudice?’, 28.
37Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German; Walkenhorst, Nation, Volk, Rasse.
38Lynn Abrams, Bismarck and the German Empire, 1871–1918 (London and New York: Routledge 2006), 43.
39Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German, 53–4.
40Treitschke was, for example, seen as the ideological father of the pan-German movement (Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German, 80). The pan-Germans were enthusiastic readers of Gobineau's work Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines, 4 vols (Paris 1853–5). Out of 1,000 copies of a German translation published by the German Gobineau Society between 1897 and 1901, 100 were directly sold to the Pan-German League; Peter Weingart, Jürgen Kroll and Kurt Bayertz, Rasse, Blut und Gene: Geschichte der Eugenik und Rassenhygiene in Deutschland (Frankfurt on Main: Suhrkamp 1992), 96.
41Walkenhorst, Nation, Volk, Rasse.
42There were also other Slavic groups, including Masurians, Kashubians and Sorbs, but their numbers were, compared to the Polish-speakers, very small. Hence, when pan-Germans referred to Slavs, they meant, in the first instance, the Polish-speaking population.
43Kaiserliches Statistisches Amt, Statistik des Deutschen Reichs: Die Volkszählung am 1. Dezember 1900 im Deutschen Reich, vol. 150/1 (Berlin: Puttkammer und Mühlbrecht 1903).
44Norman Davies, Heart of Europe: A Short History of Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1986).
45Hasse, quoted in Walkenhorst, Nation, Volk, Rasse, 74–5. All translations, unless otherwise stated, are by the author.
46Hasse, quoted in Walkenhorst, Nation, Volk, Rasse, 75. The Eastern Marches Society was, in fact, a sister organization of the Pan-German League (Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German, 55–6).
47Hasse made this very clear by stating: ‘Wir müssen den unterlegenen Gegnern, die uns im Wege sind, Reservate zuweisen, in die wir sie zurückdrängen, um unserer Entwicklung Raum zu schaffen’ (We will have to allocate zones for the inferior enemies who stand in our way, into which we will force them in order to create more space for our development); Ernst Hasse, Die Zukunft des deutschen Volkstums (Munich: J. F. Lehmann 1907), 44.
48Walkenhorst argues that, until 1918, antisemitism was not part of the official propaganda policy of radical nationalists (Walkenhorst, Nation, Volk, Rasse, 281). The pan-Germans began to express their antisemitic attitudes in the period preceding the First World War. For example, in 1912, Heinrich Claβ, the successor to Hasse as leader of the Pan-German League, published a pamphlet entitled Wenn ich der Kaiser wär’ in which he proposed a range of measures to eliminate (ausschalten, literally ‘to switch off’) the Jews in Germany; Daniel Frymann [i.e. Heinrich Claβ], Wenn ich der Kaiser wär’ (Leipzig: T. Weicher 1912), 76.
49Frymann [i.e. Claβ], Wenn ich der Kaiser wär’; Christian Petzet, Die preußischen Ostmarken, Der Kampf um das Deutschtum, vol. 3 (Munich: J. F. Lehmann 1898).
50Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 25–30.
51See Andreas Musolff, ‘Are shared metaphors the same: English and German body imagery in comparison and contrast’, in Falco Pfalzgraf and Felicity Rash (eds), Anglo-German Linguistic Relations (Frankfurt on Main, Berlin, Bern, Brussels, New York, Oxford and Vienna: Peter Lang 2008), 33–52; Andreas Musolff, Metaphor, Nation and the Holocaust: The Concept of the Body Politic (London and New York: Routledge 2010).
52Petzet, Die preußischen Ostmarken, 3.
53‘Der preussische Staat als Polonisator’, Alldeutsche Blätter, no. 16, 1894, 34.
54Petzet, Die preußischen Ostmarken, 55.
55Petzet, Die preußischen Ostmarken, 55.
56‘Zur Polenfrage’, Mitteilungen des Allgemeinen Deutschen Verbandes, vol. 3, 1892, 27.
57‘Eine andere deutsche Polenpolitik’, in Alldeutscher Verbandes (ed.), Zwanzig Jahre alldeutscher Arbeit und Kämpfe (Leipzig: Weicher 1910), 114–26 (114).
58‘Eine andere deutsche Polenpolitik’, in Alldeutscher Verbandes (ed.), Zwanzig Jahre alldeutscher Arbeit und Kämpfe (Leipzig: Weicher 1910), 124.
59‘Eine andere deutsche Polenpolitik’, in Alldeutscher Verbandes (ed.), Zwanzig Jahre alldeutscher Arbeit und Kämpfe (Leipzig: Weicher 1910), 122.
60Frymann [i.e. Claβ], Wenn ich der Kaiser wär’, 135.
61Frymann [i.e. Claβ], Wenn ich der Kaiser wär’, 9.
62Frymann [i.e. Claβ], Wenn ich der Kaiser wär’, 139.
63Frymann [i.e. Claβ], Wenn ich der Kaiser wär’, 93.
64Franz Emanuel Geibel (1815–84) was a German poet and writer. In his poem ‘Deutschlands Beruf’, he places Germany at the ‘core’ of the world and proclaims its special cultural vocation.
65Frymann [i.e. Claβ], Wenn ich der Kaiser wär’, 188.
66Musolff, ‘What role do metaphors play in racial prejudice?’.
67This was explicitly stated in one of the programmatic articles on pan-German policy towards the Polish population: ‘Als Endziel ist also natürlich festzuhalten, daβ innerhalb der Grenzen des deutschen Reiches eine rein deutsche Bevölkerung lebt’ (The ultimate goal is of course a German empire within whose borders lives a pure German population) (‘Eine andere deutsche Polenpolitik’, 115).
68The view of one's own nation as a chosen people or a divine redeemer was not uniquely German. Such visions were also prevalent in other nations, notably in Poland with its concept of Polish messianism or in France with its mission de la France éternelle. See Hannah Arendt, ‘Imperialism, nationalism, chauvinism’, Review of Politics, vol. 7, no. 4, 1945, 441–63 (458).
69Frymann [i.e. Claβ], Wenn ich der Kaiser wär’, 39.
70Musolff, ‘What role do metaphors play in racial prejudice?’.
71Musolff, ‘What role do metaphors play in racial prejudice?’.
72Charteris-Black, Politicians and Rhetoric, 51.
73‘Eine neue Polenpolitik?!’, in Alldeutscher Verbandes (ed.), Zwanzig Jahre alldeutscher Arbeit und Kämpfe, 13–22 (16).
74See ‘Eine neue Ära nationaler Politik’, Die Ostmark, no. 11, 1897; ‘Eine neue Polenpolitik?!’, 15; and ‘Die Frage der slawischen Gefahr in der Ostmark’, in Alldeutscher Verbandes (ed.), Zwanzig Jahre Alldeutscher Arbeit und Kämpfe, 71–5 (71).
75‘Aus unserer Ostmark. Realpolitische Betrachtungen’, Die Ostmark, no. 10, 1897; Frymann [i.e. Claβ], Wenn ich der Kaiser wär’, 39.
76‘Die politischen Ergebnisse der Rassenforschung’, in Alldeutscher Verbandes (ed.), Zwanzig Jahre Alldeutscher Arbeit und Kämpfe, 272–5 (275).
77‘Eine andere deutsche Polenpolitik’, 115.
78Rash, The Language of Violence.
79‘Die Frage der slawischen Gefahr in der Ostmark’, 72; ‘Eine andere deutsche Polenpolitik’, 114.
80‘Die politischen Ergebnisse der Rassenforschung’, 273–4.
81‘Die politischen Ergebnisse der Rassenforschung’, 273.
82Petzet, Die preußischen Ostmarken, 61.
83‘Die politischen Ergebnisse der Rassenforschung’, 275.
84Weingart, Kroll and Bayertz, Rasse, Blut und Gene.
85Weingart, Kroll and Bayertz, Rasse, Blut und Gene. , 91–103.
86Rash, The Language of Violence.
87‘Eine neue Polenpolitik?!’, 15.
88‘Unsere Polenpolitik’, Alldeutsche Blätter, no. 11, 1899.
89‘Eine andere deutsche Polenpolitik’, 122.
90‘Eine andere deutsche Polenpolitik’, 122.
91‘Die politischen Ergebnisse der Rassenforschung’, 275. Here, the author of the article is quoting a statement made by Johann Gottlieb Fichte in his Reden an die deutsche Nation (1808).
92See, for example, Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl and Liebhart, The Discursive Construction of National Identity; and Riggins, ‘The rhetoric of othering’.
93Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German, 9.