About the book, from the publisher:In the Nazi genocide of European Jews, words preceded, accompanied, and made mass murder possible. Using a multilayered approach to connect official language to everyday life, historian Thomas Pegelow Kaplan analyzes the role of language in genocide. This study seeks to comprehend how the perpetrators constructed difference, race, and their perceived enemies; how Nazi agencies communicated to the public through the nation's press; and how Germans of Jewish ancestry received, contested, and struggled for survival and self against remarkable odds. The Language of Nazi Genocide covers the historical periods of the late Weimar Republic, the Nazi regime, and early postwar Germany. However, by addressing the architecture of conceptual separation between groups and the means by which social aggression is disseminated, this study offers a model for comparative studies of linguistic violence, hate speech, and genocide in the modern world.Read an excerpt from The Language of Nazi Genocide, and learn more about the book at the Cambridge University Press website.
Thomas Pegelow Kaplan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Davidson College and an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellow at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam.
The Page 99 Test: The Language of Nazi Genocide.
--Marshal Zeringue
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