When I was around 17, I had an English textbook for advanced learners that offered some pearls of wisdom at the very back: ‘the author does not always mean what the meaning means it to mean’. Shout-out to my buddy Mario who discovered it first. We laughed our heads off every class. But it’s true, of course. Language is largely what you decide it is. Or we rather. That’s why we have poetry in the first place, exploring all the different shades of references. But that flexibility of language also sets it up as a servant of oppression, violence, and segregation. Including punctuation. Including – very much so – my beloved exclamation mark.
Last week, I’ve been proofreading the German translation of my book on the exclamation mark, coming out in January next year. The publisher asked me to add background in relation to the mark in Germany, that is, its early history in the Renaissance, and also its particular role in the enslavement of language under the Nazis.
! was sadly a part of that, too. Here’s how.
Linguists and historians have recognised the radical changes the national socialist regime forced onto the German language even as it was happening: Jewish-German literary scholar Victor Klemperer collected notes on loose sheets of paper that he published as a book two years after the war in 1947.
Okay, I know it’s not to the point, but the story of the book and Klemperer’s life itself are just incredibly interesting and dramatic, and you have to know: Klemperer’s wife Eva was a so-called “Aryan” German, which protected her husband somewhat. They miraculously made it through the war without being deported, although Victor was forced out of his job as a professor of French literature at the University of Dresden, and the couple had to move into a “Judenhaus”, a house owned by a Jewish person, where Jewish people were forced to live in order to oversee and control them better.
Eva would regularly carry Victor’s observations on the changes of German language and other of his writings in a suitcase to her friend and doctor Annemarie Köhler, because the secret police could raid the house at any moment. Eva herself was a fabulously talented painter, translator, pianist and composer, but rather than to carry her work into safety, too, she kept her paintings and compositions in the house which was hit by an allied bomb in the infamous bombing of Dresden in February 1945. Victor himself wrote in his diary that his wife was ‘infinitely more talented, and nothing of hers remains’.
The couple was about to be deported, but the horrific bombing that destroyed the historic city centre, and other parts of Dresden created such havoc and confusion that they were able to flee. When the war was over a few months later, they returned to Dresden, and were instrumental in re-building the cultural landscape — not of Germany but of the GDR. Victor received several posts at different universities, and Eva was active in the cultural committee of East Germany. She died from a heart attack in 1951. A year later, Victor married one of his former students 45 years his junior, which, as a sucker for romance, I’m a little bit sad about…but he seemed to need a strong woman by his side, since the new wife helped him organise his academic journeys, and took care of his legacy after his death. A bit like Thomas Hardy and his helper-cum-second-wife Florence maybe? 😬
¶
Well, this was a long parenthesis! Klemperer’s work is priceless in being an immediate witness to the manipulation of language by the Nazis and its effect on brainwashing the people. Klemperer and others after him saw changes both in terms of vocabulary itself, as well as to a lesser degree grammar. Klemperer’s Notebook of a Philologist is also called LTI (standing for “Lingua Tertii Imperii” or “Language of the Third Reich”), alluding to the Nazi tendency to abbreviate and Latinise words like KZ for “Konzentrationslager” (concentration camp) or “BDM” for “Bund Deutscher Mädchen” (“League of German Girls”).
Metaphors from technology or boxing were rife, for example, as was a push to unify what was seen as disparate orthography and pronunciation, both part and parcel of the imperial aspirations of the Nazis to gather Germany’s neighbours into a Greater Germanic Reich. Klemperer saw this as a ‘terrible unitising’ of all ‘expressions of life and legacies’.
Everything was supposed to become bigger and better than it had ever been before; ‘absolutely’ and ‘eternal’ prefaced every word; ‘war’ was not enough, it had to be a kind of self-and-other-annihilating ‘total war’. In the orthography reform of 1944, it says ‘we set a strong-sounding, firmly bounded, soldier-like taut, substantial way of speaking against soft, tension-poor, strengthless speaking in order to train orthography’. I’m translating and it’s actually difficult to find English equivalents that don’t sound utterly ridiculous for the made-up words in German.
Punctuation was not immune against such linguistic megalomania: Nazi communication strategy hijacked the punching-power of !, attaching it to every and any kind of word or sentence. Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels was positively obsessed with exclamation marks (and triplets of marks). He poured them into the weekly wall newspaper Parole der Woche (“Slogan of the Week”) that appeared between 1936 and 43.
Goebbels also had extra !! added into a speech made from the Führer bunker during a British bombardment in September 1942 in order to urge an already mouth-foaming Hitler to bark out threats and accusations even more: “The hour for us to reply will come this time too!!! May the main criminals of this war and their Jewish backers then not start to pule and snivel when the end will be worse for England than the beginning!!!’. The publicly-circulating speech only showed one !.
Linguist Konrad Ehlich believes this slapping of exclamations marks onto the end of statements turns all utterance into shouting, all thinking into order. You follow the Führer and his ideology not only in word, deed, and feeling, but also in the square structure of command imposed onto your language. Klemperer, again, is perspicacious in describing this frenetic braying: ‘Everything in it was speech, had to be address, call, whipping up’ (“alles in ihr war Rede, musste Anrede, Aufruf, Aufpeitschung sein”).
¶
In his 1956 essay ‘Punctuation Marks’, German sociologist, musicologist, and all-round philosopher star Theodor W. Adorno deemed exclamation marks as ‘soundless cymbal-crashing’, a sudden orchestral sforzato that makes your ears tremble, a red traffic sign, an admonishing index finger, and, damningly, an unbearable ‘gesture of authority’. Do this! Don’t do that! Adorno’s father came from a Jewish family, so he, like Victor Klemperer and so many other Germans, was forced out of his university post into exile.
When words are bland, the exclamation mark manages to infuse some zing into boring blabla. When words are already jumping off the page and into the nervous system of those who read them, the exclamation mark doubles and triples that attack, creating an urgency the situation doesn’t necessarily call-for.
What has happened once can happen again. And it does.
In the run-up to the presidential elections of 2016, Donald Trump adorned 60% of his Tweets with !. In the 12 years of his Twitter presence, 57.000 exclamations in 33.000 Tweets have leapt at the millions of eye-balls following his social media all over the world, and the number of ! markedly rose during the 4 years of his presidency.
¶
Professor of social psychology Kees van den Bos has found that encountering a ! activates an area in our brain responsible for pre-panic deliberation. We’re not full-on survival-mode yet, but we’re already on our toes. We’re already perking up.
! makes us worried, and it makes us more judgmental, van den Bos realised. We are likely to understand a situation as very unfair rather than just unfair when we see a ! flash up. The American Psychological Association reported that stress levels in the U.S. shot up during the presidential race in 2016, and persisted after Trump’s inauguration. His manner of speaking and doing politics painfully exposed the country’s faultlines like none before, exacerbating traditional divides between democrate and republican many times over.
This is by no means to compare Trumpian rhetoric to Nazi rhetoric. Rhetoric works in similar ways wherever it is being used, for good or bad (perhaps you felt activated when you heard the more alarming word “climate catastrophe” rather than “climate change” for the first time). Rhetoric will always be rhetoric. Beware.
For the Nazis, Klemperer writes, everything became a crisis: increasing the birth rate was a “battle of births” (“Geburtenschlacht”); job creation was the “battle for work” (“Arbeitsschlacht”). That’s not exactly far away from the exaggerations we surrender to online nowadays: inflammatory rhetoric grabs attention better than positive words or news, creating more stress in people, and more of the same toxic stuff (because, algorithm). The angrier the comments, the more we scroll and stay, engaging more - seeing more ads. From the safety and comfort of our living rooms, we can now shout dehumanising hatred at others and whole groups of people in a way we’re much less likely to do when face-to-face with those people.
Trolling and abusive rhetoric has always existed. That’s neither new to us nor to the national socialists nor to the Greeks 2000 years ago. But the level and ubiquity of it has reached a new scale through the internet that’s frightening and shows no signs of abating unless regulated by companies and governments. When defence ministers call their declared enemies “human animals”, times are very very grim. We inherit language, that is true. But we are also actively shaping it. And that is where our responsibility lies.
In the Renaissance, they knew about the awful power of rhetoric: Hercules, the strongest man that ever lived, was also a master-orator. Emblem-makers like Andrea Alciato chose the hero as representative of eloquence: a golden chain would lead from his mouth to the ears of the people around him. He led them with his persuasive words - not his physical might. ‘Armes font place aux lettres,’ the description under the image reads in the original, ‘Arms make way for words’. That’s something to remember.
Language has agency. It really does change what’s out there. As Victor Klemperer knew right there and then, when the stuff his life’s work was made of - language - was threatening him every day: ‘words can be tiny doses of arsenic; they are being swallowed unwittingly; they don’t seem to have any impact; and after some time, the poison has acted after all” (“Worte können sein wie winzige Arsendosen: sie werden unbemerkt verschluckt, sie scheinen keine Wirkung zu tun, und nach einiger Zeit ist die Giftwirkung doch da”).
It is always, but never more than now, a good time to be very very careful with words. And punctuation.