The Kindly Ones

by Jonathan Littell

This tendency spread to all our bureaucratic language, our bürokratisches Amtsdeutsch, as my colleague Eichmann would say: in correspondance, in speeches too, passive constructions dominated: “it has been decided that…,” “the Jews have been conveyed to the special treatment,” “this difficult task has been carried out,” and so things were done all by themselves, no one ever did anything, no one acted, they were actions without actors, which is always reassuring, and in a way they weren’t even actions, since by the special usage that our National Socialist language made of certain nouns, one managed, if not completely to eliminate verbs, at least to reduce them to the state of useless (but nonetheless decorative) appendages, and that way, you did without even action, there were only facts, brute realities, either already present or waiting for their inevitable accomplishment, like the Einsatz, or the Einbruch (the breakthrough), the Verwertung (the utilization), the Entpolonisierung (the de-Polonization), the Ausrottung (the extermination), but also, in a contrary sense, the Versteppung, the “steppification” of Europe by the Bolshevik hordes who, contrary to Attila, razed civilization in order to let the grass grow for their horses. Man lebt in seiner Sprache, wrote Hanns Johst, one of our best National Socialist poets: “You live in your language.