The German philosopher and philologist Viktor Klemperer began studying the language and specific words used by the Nazis in 1933. Relying on various sources (radio speeches from Hitler or Goebbels, announcements of births and deaths, newspapers, books and brochures, discussions, etc.), he was able to examine the destruction of the German spirit and culture by the Nazi " Newspeak". By keeping his diary, he engaged in an act of resistance and survival.

In 1947, this work resulted in the book LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii, The Language of the Third Reich – Notes of a Philologist, which became a reference text for any reflection on the language of totalitarianism. Reading it, nearly eighty years later, shows how much the modern world struggles to heal from that infectious language, as well as that no language is immune to new attempts at manipulation.

Viktor Klemperer’s analysis of the language of National Socialism and its impact is a masterpiece of historiography. At the same time, it is a first-rate historical document for the self-preservation of a scholar of language and literature in a time of despair.

Klemperer’s study emerged from his belief that the language of the Third Reich contributed to the formation of Nazi culture. As he writes: "Not only must Nazi acts disappear, but also Nazi ideology, the typical Nazi way of thinking, and the ground that reproduces it: the language of Nazism."

BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS
VIKTOR KLEMPERER (1881-1960), a veteran of World War I, where he fought on the front lines, became a professor of French literature, specializing in the French Enlightenment, at the University of Dresden, from which he was expelled in 1935 because he was Jewish. He survived solely due to being married to a woman of "Aryan race," who supported him and followed him through all the hardships and humiliations he endured under the Nazi regime.

An tireless scholar, journalist, and university professor, he lived through four successive periods of German political history – from the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, and the Nazi state to the German Democratic Republic – and is regarded as one of the most significant witnesses of the tumultuous 20th century of European history.