Notes on a Panic -- 90s Edition, Part 3

PC Dictionaries come to Germany ... and things get weird

For the next book in my series, I am looking at the only German dictionary of “political correctness” I could find: The Deutsches Phrasenlexikon: Politische Korrektheit von A bis Z (1995). So admittedly, it’s got “Political Correctness from A to Z” only in the subtitle, but the title Lexicon of German Phraseology, as well as the layout and most of the terms, position this as a clear analogue to the English and French books I’ve been looking at in the previous entries in this series. As with André Santini (whose book I’ve misplaced somewhere in my office, which is why I haven’t finished that particular post), in the case of this book it’s the author who’s particularly interesting, more so than the work itself. The book is bog-standard mid-90s language wars — but like de Villiers’ book in French (which came out one year after Röhl’s), its pretty well-rehearsed gripes hide a pretty important historical transition. One that I explore — quelle coincidence! — in The Cancel Culture Panic. (Speaking of wonderful coincidences: THE GIVEAWAY! It’s still ongoing!)

Klaus Rainer Röhl (1928-2021) was a pretty remarkable figure, and his story is in a way the story of a generation (or at least part of a generation). Röhl passed away in 2021 and was perhaps most famous for being the editor of the far left magazine konkret, as well as being married to the journalist and later RAF-terrorist Ulrike Meinhof (they got divorced right before Ulrike went underground in 1968). Röhl turned to the right over the course of the 1970s — pretty far to the right. In 1987, he asked the revisionist historian Ernst Nolte — famous for the “historians’ controversy” — to advise his dissertation.

In case you’re not up on your mid-80s German intellectual history, the “historians’ controversy” started when Nolte posited that the Nazis’ “race murder” had been modeled on (and in fact only occurred in reaction to) the “class murder” of the Soviets. Just yikes. It was a claim that made him something of an outcast among professional historians (whether in Germany or outside of it), but it made him a darling of the far right. In his autobiography, Röhl says that the decision to write his dissertation with Nolte was an explicit expression of “demonstrative” “solidarity”. So he, as we would say today, deliberately picked a scholar he regarded as “canceled” or “heterodox” as his adviser. The resulting diss was all about horseshoe theorizing, i.e. the idea that Nazis and communists in the 1920s had not really been very distinct.

He published a book on Left-Wing Life Lies (Linke Lebenslügen) in 1994, contributed to a pretty influential volume (Die selbstbewusste Nation) that gathered important writers associated with the New Right in Germany — many of whom were pretty central to “PC”-complaints when they first arose in German media.

(Just a quick note that the first of the four photos on the cover of Linke Lebenslügen is of Röhl’s ex-wife, Ulrike Meinhof. Followed by a man who would go on to be Secretary of the Environment in Germany, a man who would go on to be Foreign Secretary, and a candidate for chancellor for the social democrats. I guess what I’m saying is: (1) seems like he was able to make fine distinctions about left-wingers and definitely didn’t paint with an absurdly broad brush; and (2) seems like he handled the breakup extremely well.)

Politically, Röhl was part of the so-called “Liberale Offensive”, “national liberals” within the Free Democratic Party (FDP) — so basically people who combined an emphasis on right-wing talking points (and broadly anti-immigration politics) with a libertarian streak when it came to economic issues and the welfare state. Renegade figures abound in discourses about “PC” — chastened leftists who ended up “breaking ranks” (as the title of John Podhoretz’s memoir about this process frames it) are mainstays in books about the evils of a newly dominant “left wing authoritarianism”, or “McCarthyism from the left”. As I’ve explored elsewhere, a supposed cancellation was also a nice way to narrate that kind of defection. It’s perhaps no real shock that Röhl found himself writing a book about “PC”. It also of course came at an opportune moment generationally: for Röhl wasn’t alone in turning right in the 70s. A lot of 60s radicals had made some money and mellowed out a bit, and some of them had mellowed out a lot. By the mid-90s, a vocabulary that made their own increasing conservatism expressible in ways that didn’t feel straightforwardly right wing, was understandably in high demand. So far, so typical.

But Röhl is also part of a more specific movement that I describe in more detail in The Cancel Culture Panic. And in this respect he isn’t so much representative of a larger portion of the population so much as he’s whitewashing something for the kinds of people (middle-class former leftists busy aging and settling down) who would have recoiled from the non-whitewashed version. What do I mean by this? When “PC” arrived in Germany in the 90s, it latched on to an earlier discourse about stuff you were supposedly not allowed to say. And that stuff had nothing to do with feminism, sexual harassment, language change, etc. — it had everything to do with the Nazis, the Third Reich, the Holocaust and German nationhood. But what happened to that earlier vocabulary was that it was laundered in the 90s discourse. Since “PC” was a discourse about the US, and since it coincided with the rise of the New Right, it was pretty easy to muddy the water what supposed limits on speech and thought one was truly upset about. Was this about prohibitions on, you know, certain costumes at carnival? Or about how one felt about the Nazis and the Holocaust?

When comparing it to the other books I’ve looked at in the series, Röhl’s book is unusual (and kind of admirable) in that it is quite clear who exactly speaks the kind of “PC” German Röhl hates. As we’ve seen in previous entries, that’s not usually the case. Empty phraseology may be thought of as a problem across a society. One of the problems of “PC”-discourses (and “cancel culture”-discourse today) is that they pick out certain phraseologies as particularly significant, oppressive, onerous, you name it. In fact, they can sometimes act as though phraseology were not a problem (or a differently constituted problem) elsewhere in society. But they never explain why pronouns are a big deal, but misusing “literally” isn’t. A cynic would say: they don’t have to, and a cynic would be correct. But the fact that they don’t bother is part of their appeal: “the language change you hate around people you hate,” they propose to their readers, “is a political problem and a sign of a narrowing of discourse.” Röhl’s book, by contrast, is far more explicit in breaking down the speakers of “politically correct” German — in fact, he does so on the back cover!

“This lexicon gives a humorous and precise overview of the most important words and phrases of politically correct newspeak […]. Meaning: the language of concern (Weizsäcker-German), the jargon of post-68 politicians and media people (Tuscany German), feminist slang, autonomous [Marxist] cant, alternative dialects (like hypochondriac German, formerly known as musli-German.”

Laudably, the back cover also includes a list of examples: among them “acceptance”, “antideutsch”, “liberation”, “high earners”, “sexual harassment” and various foodstuffs that bear racist names. So: chapeau, I’m glad we’re getting specific right off the bat! But: What’s interesting about these two lists is that they seem specific, but actually muddy the waters a lot. The first list comprises a general list of people right wingers in Germany tend to dislike (Green Party voters! Feminists!), the second a list of words that get right wingers mad. What’s missing is the connection — does the second list really describe the language of the groups in the first? The idea that “autonomous marxists” (i.e. “autonomous groups” of non-orthodox Marxist and anarchist movements that occupied abandoned buildings and got into fights with the police throughout the 1980s and 90s) speak a similar language as erstwhile German President Richard von Weizsäcker is pretty wild. The idea that either an oi!-punk from Altona or a center-right politician avoids the word “M**renkopf” (a racist name for a foam candy with chocolate cover) is quite odd. In fact, people like Weizsäcker were perfectly capable of sounding the alarm about language change by 1995 — his party, the CDU, was very partial to complaints about political correctness.

The idea of “Toskanadeutsch” (Tuscany German) likewise sounds hyperspecific, but turns out to be oddly schematic. The reason Röhl invokes Tuscany here is that the area became a very popular holiday destination for upwardly mobile middle class Germans. Most likely he’s thinking of people like the satirist and cartoonist Robert Gernhardt — 60s lefty radicals who had become comfortable and fairly well-off, who bought up run-down farmhouses somewhere between Lucca and Orvieto with some friends sometime in the mid-70s, and by 1995 spent their summers there. Here a description of these people from Gernhardt himself, in an interview with Der Spiegel, a year before Röhl’s book came out.

SPIEGEL: “Nevertheless the German Tuscany-Faction is growing. What kind of refugees are these?

Gernhardt: “Certainly not hedonistic SPD [social democratic] politicians — at least not in the area where I live. Here we’re mostly italophile loners who avoid one another on purpose. I too am seized in Tuscany by frequent bouts of anti-Germanness.”

The reason I’m harping on this invocation of a Tuscany-faction is twofold: First, this also doesn’t seem like a group of people that’s super likely to talk about “sexual harassment” a whole lot. In fact, Robert Gernhardt was arguably concerned in his own work with destroying what he considered “sacred cows” of the Left — which throughout the late 70s and 80s often took the shape of what would later be called deliberate “political incorrectness”. Marc Fabian Erdl, in the most in-depth study of German “PC”-discourse (which came out in 2004), sets up the regular blow-ups around the limits of satire deliberately precipitated by Gernhardt and his friends, as a German proto-version of “PC”-debates before the label “PC” existed. All of which is a long way to say: Röhl’s targets not only seem pretty unlikely to actually speak the PC-German he wants to identify and criticize; they seem to actively criticize PC-German! Probably, the invocation of Tuscany worked back then a little like a mention of lattes or avocado toast might today — it’s a weird mix of class markers and cultural resentments, and it is oddly non-specific. The people you associate with it don’t actually eat it, the people who actually eat it, tend not to have the beliefs you ascribe to them.

But the second point is far more serious. Because what seems to tie these seemingly disparate complaints (and these two lists) together is the relationship to Germany. Neither Weizsäcker nor my hypothetical oi!-punk would use PC terms for certain kinds of schnitzel or candy; and they might well disagree on a bunch of other words that Röhl treats in his dictionary. But what they (at least to Röhl’s mind) agreed on are a specific set of terms Röhl kind of sprinkles in throughout his book: the punks were probably “antideutsch” (i.e. pushing the idea that German nationalism was an evil and there should “never again be a Germany”); and Weizsäcker was famous for insisting that the end of World War II was for Germany also a kind of “liberation” (and not just a defeat). It’s hard to escape the sense, in other words, that the stuff about organic farming and renaming foodstuffs is so much window-dressing — the real point is about German history and the correct relationship to it. And the correct relationship, to Röhl, seems to be … a bit more affirmative than you’d think would be warranted given — you know — German history.

Let me briefly walk you through the entry for “Multikulti” (basically a usually derisive term for multiculturalism). I won’t translate it here in detail, because the entry is pretty allusive, and any attempt to render it in English would just yield a word salad. It’s definitely a kind of performance — not so much essayistic as free-associative. Generally, I’d say this is punny, not funny. Like most of these types of books, it seems to want to be funny but ends up sounding aggrieved and peevish. Perhaps I’m just not in the target demographic, but if you did this as a standup bit, I don’t think you’d get many laughs.

1. The first thing to note is the relationship to the US, which is pretty typical for the German reception of “PC”-discourse. The entry is at pains to highlight the US extraction of the alleged problems it’s describing — we get Jimmy Carter, the “PC dictatorship”, etc. What it seems at pains not to acknowledge is that its description/critique of these problems is itself a US import. Röhl has clearly absorbed (though likely second-hand) some US critiques of “identity politics”, though he doesn’t use that term yet. When he mentions that “multiculturalism” is the battle cry of “strong minorities” who “are the ones marching under the banner of the PC dictatorship in the US”, when he claims that these minorities “are segregating culturally and ethnically, wanting nothing to do with a mix of cultures, but instead searching for their roots [English in the original],” he’s clearly recapitulating a set of US neoconservative cavils about the fraying of society in a supposed “culture of narcissism”. But this isn’t something the text explicitly invokes — meaning that the reaction (outrage at the supposed fracturing of society under the onslaught of identitarian minorities) gets to seem more German than it really is, while the thing being reacted to (minorities asserting themselves against a national monoculture) is presented as more American than it really is.

2. Secondly, after this philosophical/historical preamble, the entry just largely consists of things that a racist uncle might observe during an insanely uncomfortable Thanksgiving dinner: “Foreigners” use lots of garlic??? “Asylum seekers” love stealing things??? This was bog standard and absolute hack shit even back then. But let’s not get hung up on just how dumb and offensive this stuff is. Note that this passage occurs in a book about tired and overused phrases. Sure, this is racist — but above all it is just staggeringly hacky. It’s itself tired and overused discourse, marshaled allegedly in the service of criticizing overused discourse. I think this points to how habit is deployed in these books in general: these books are hyperaware of new social habits, or linguistic habits that have to do with societal change; but what they marshal in response is just the most knee-jerk racism and sexism. And again, it’s probably not the racism or the sexism that is the point — it’s the knee-jerk impulse. It’s unreflected, ingrained habits against new habits.

3. Finally, Röhl sees “multiculturalism” as an attempt to “save us [Germans] from nationalism” (he’s being very sarcastic here, so imagine some pretty big scare quotes. This is almost certainly a reference to the antideutsche idea that the The “In short: multikulti-döner against the politically incorrect Königsberger Klopse.” So döner kabob is PC, because it is non-German, and Königsberger Klopse — a meat ball with herring in a lemony caper cream sauce — are un-PC because they’re authentically German. But the allusion goes further than that — for these meatballs aren’t so much German cuisine, they are East Prussian cuisine. Meaning: the reason they’re un-PC is because mourning the loss of East Prussia smacks of historical revisionism. So yes, multicultural Germany is “PC”, whereas the source of un-PC Germany has the shape of … the borders of 1939.

This is what makes Röhl’s Deutsches Phrasenlexikon such a typical document of German “PC”-discourse in the 90s. Yes, it’s about dumb little language changes, about what to call various foodstuffs and whether ladies can be pilots. But threaded throughout is an earlier jargon of historical revisionism — one that, when served straight, would have been easily recognizable as pretty far right. But one that, when served up in a dictionary with a bunch of phrases that, well, yes, you do find kind of annoying, is easy to miss. Röhl’s “lexicon” is part of a shift in Germany: from a moment where the thing you’re supposedly no longer allowed to talk about were Auschwitz and Hitler; to a moment where the thing you’re supposedly no longer allowed to talk about was how much you hated your immigrant neighbors.