There is a popular conception that German is a decidedly harsh language, characterised by its reliance on glottal tones and frequent sibilance. Though there is justification in the phonology for this stereotype, much the same could be said for French, a language that is often pampered and praised as “the language of love”. In fact, the French and German phonologies share far more similarities than French and its other familial relations on the southwestern side of the European continent. For instance, the “eu”, “e”, “u”, “o”, and “ê”, all find similar counterparts in German with “ö”, “e”, “ü”, “o”, and “e” (in varying circumstances).
So, perhaps it’s the partial agglutination that sets German apart, presenting its long compound words as harsh or (as frequently portrayed) angry. This feature also often creates excessive redundancies as in the case of “Freundschaftsbeziehungen”--literally “friendship relationship”.
However, it is this precise form of very literal agglutination that gives German the special quality I want to highlight. Through its reliance on the hyper literal, the language allows for an extensive poetic use, something that shines in the world of philosophy (and the world of obfuscation, as we will see in the example of Nazism).
Take for instance a handful of terms taken from Heidegger (perhaps the greatest user of German’s poetic potential and a frequent coiner of terms). The most important term in all of Heidegger’s philosophy is Dasein or Da sein. At first, this term appears to be simple. It literally breaks down as There (Da) Being (Sein), or in more recognisable English, Being there. So then, why has this been the biggest translating problem for those working with Heidegger’s work?
Well, firstly, Heidegger himself disavowed such a translation. As a philosopher chiefly preoccupied by the poetic, this seems like enough justification for another path. Instead, the term is often translated more simply as “existence” (and in some translations you can see it conflated with “being-in-the-world”).
This is all a perfect representation of what I mean. Heidegger’s term is untranslatable, not because the words don’t exist, but because there is a poetic beauty in the original German’s simplicity, and its ability to transcend the literal into a linguistic Hinterwelt. Heidegger’s Dasein refers to the form of being experienced by human beings and only by human beings. It is the original form of human being, and naturally proceeds thinking. It’s simple and it’s beautiful: Being There.
(At this moment I would like to take a quick sidetrack as a means of trying to explain Heidegger’s thinking here. This can be done by comparatively looking at a film that shares the name with this concept of being (based on the 1970 novel). In the film, we follow a simple man who stumbles into situations in life without any agency or real choice in the matter. By the end of the story Chance, our hero, has accomplished the goal of every human, lived a full and completed life, and he never once had to think or act in order to do so. Instead, he Was. He represented this raw and natural state of being which precedes any other human experience as the natural state of our existence. Eat your heart out Descartes.)
Heidegger's main mission in using these terms was to free himself from history and assosiation. This is why he crafted brand new words to perfectly describe the brand new things that he was talking about.
Contrary to the beautiful philosophical prose of Heidegger (though unfortunately connected by circumstance) is the glossary of Nazi terminology. Right at the top is the word “Abbeförderung”--literally “removing”. It was the euphemistic term used for killing. Though we share similar euphemistic terms in the West (one can’t help but think of all the ‘disappearing’ that happened under Pinochet) the actual construxion is quite different. The prefix “ab” often means “away from”. The basic morphological unit “befördern” means “to bring from one place to another” or “to create” or “to be promoted”. And we see, the richness already reveals itself! “Befördern” itself is a di-morphological construxion, consisting of “be”, acting as a transitive alteration, and “fördern”, which can mean “to support” or “move forward”. It is also etymologically related to the English word “further”. The last piece of our original word, “ung”, is similar to the English gerund.
All put together, the word can be interpreted in a number of different ways, but here are two of the most interesting. There is the literal: away from + one place + ing, as in the sense of the translation, removing. Or the more interesting deconstruxion, more telling of the euphemistic usage: away from + create + ing. Though not even close to a literal translation or in keeping with the parts of speech established in the German, this translation essentially broke down the original word as “un-creating”. Quite similar to killing I’d say. And this is just the surface!
Of course the same etymological tricks can be played on English, so what is the true factor elevating German as a literally poetic language? For my argument, I’d put forward that German is a Geschichte-verfolgt language (my own coinage and with an equally intangible definition, though we can think of its closest translation as ‘haunted’) as well as being less outwardly corrupted by other influences, such in the case of English (Latin, Old French, German, Greek).
What I mean by the former is that German has a history, a connotation, and a colloquial usage which is perfectly suited to this poetic obfuscation. Much of the Western philosophy, whether good or bad, has come from German. Kant, Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger. And thus philosophy is Geschichte-verfolgt by German. We may translate or disregard many of the terms established by those above, but they will continue to haunt regardless. In the 20th century, especially the latter half, I would argue this Geschichte-verfolgt was replaced by French--though the French language lacks that agglutinative obfuscation already mentioned, and thus isn’t suited to the job.
The Media-Lingua, the words we speak, the phrases we use, be faulty representations will always fail us. We will be trapped by their Geschichte-verfolgt disposition, not communicate what we truly mean, draw unwanted associations. Thus is the nature of language, a web of association (Derrida’s greatest contribution alongside hauntology). I coin new terms as a means of escape, and I often turn to German because of its character, its history, its potential. Language too, the greatest piece of Media, has der Wille zur Macht. It has a longing to Become. From the tower of Babel to the streets of the Neu, we might as well help it along the way.
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