2023-08-13 12:14:04
Germanist emeritus, translator of great authors from across the Rhine, Olivier Mannoni has been given a mission: to translate “Mein Kampf”. It exposes this long (linguistic) supper with the devil.
When Fayard asks Mannoni to re-translate the seven hundred abyssal pages of “Mein Kampf”, he does not hesitate. After fifty translations of works on Nazi medicine, anti-Semitism, the Holocaust by bullets, the camps, it seems logical to return to the source. And yet, the course will be very uneven…
Can we do well by translating “Mein Kampf”?
“Never, in any text before this book, had I been confronted with such density and such violence in the expression of hatred.”
I write it in my essay: it is “the very profanation of my profession” because “never, in any text before this book, had I been confronted with such density and such violence in the expression of hatredthat bubbling, malevolent and pernicious resentment described [le philosophe allemand, ndlr] Peter Sloterdijk”.
“Our editor at Fayard, Florent Brayard, told me of his intuition: on the contrary, to restore the illegibility inherent in Hitler’s language. We had to take everything back and ‘badly’ translate the bad.”
This text translates first of all the incapacity of Hitler, a formidable orator, in the face of writing. So I initially “worked well”, erased the faults, rectified the inaccuracies. The first translation of 1934 made the book accessible. Mine was simply making sure to lighten up a sentence overloaded with adverbs. Then, our editor at Fayard, Florent Brayard, told me of his intuition: on the contrary, to restore the illegibility inherent in Hitler’s language. It was necessary to take everything back and “badly” translate the bad.
In total, “historicizing evil” will have required ten years of work by the translator, and five more by the editor with the historians.
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What kind of language is this?
She counts stun the reader, like the audience, with a destructured syntax, mislead before drawing any simplifying conclusions. The process is similar to that of speeches: very long, illogical sentences, and a summary conclusion.
“This Nazi language, of which “Mein Kampf” is the primary source, drowns reality in words. It expresses an abyssal contempt for knowledge and a bitterness towards the circles of knowledge.”
This Nazi language whose “My fight“is the primary source, is not only political. It permeates all texts: the legal and administrative corpus, historical or economic analyses. It drowns reality in words. It expresses an abyssal contempt for knowledge and an bitterness towards circles of knowledge. In several chapters, Hitler pours out his hatred of culture and education. Words are invented for this purpose: Schwabinger denigrates the artists of the district of Schwabing, in Munich, and writingthe equivalent of piss-copy, berates journalists and sounds like messcrap.
From the outset, the principle of this vocabulary has a function: to say while dissimulating.my fight” is a permanently encrypted text. This linguistic pretense goes hand in hand with the future decorum of a movement like “Strength through Joy“, “Strength through joy”.
As Viktor Klemperer shows in “LTI, the language of the Third Reich” and Raul Hillberg in “The Extermination of the Jews of Europe“, this concealment function then serves to hide the reality of the Solution finale.
“my fight” already theorizes the regime and its organization, and foreshadows the multiple verticality of power structures analyzed by Ian Kershaw in his “Hitler”, even if the Holocaust is not announced as such. And this book, sold in 12 million copies, has impregnated the minds of a huge part of the people and their leaders.
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Where does this language come from?
Around 1860, the current ethniccombining racism, eugenics, esotericism and worship of the earth, resonates with the thought of the English Gobineauwho published in 1853 the “Essay on the inequality of human races and French Drumontauthor in 1886 of “Jewish France“.
A historian like Oswald Spenglerwith “The Decline of the Westpublished in 1918, invokes excessive explanations by resorting to a mythological lyricism. Alfred RosenbergNazi author of “Myth of the 20th Century” in 1930, was inspired by the racist theories of another Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain.
Another current, hygienism informs Hitler’s theory of the “great replacement” by the Jews and the creation of a “pure” and “healthy” people. In Scandinavian countries, sterilization campaigns are advocated, an idea later taken up by the Nazis.
Has this language of concealment spread?
This fearsome rhetoric has enabled Holocaust deniers like Robert Faurisson to deny the reality of the Holocaust, one of the fundamental goals of the regime, which implemented the Final Solution by hiding it.
“Today, this attack on the tongue is emulated. Trump uses logorrhea in all respects similar, even if the ex-president is neither a warmonger nor an exterminator.”
Le Pen’s declaration in 1987 conceals all the rhetoric of this chain of denial: “I am not saying that the gas chambers did not exist. I myself might not see any. I did not I haven’t specifically studied the question, but I believe it’s a point of detail in the history of the Second World War. […] Do you want to tell me that this is a revealed truth that everyone must believe?” He returned to it in 2015: “What I said corresponded to my thought, that the gas chambers were a detail of the history of war, unless one admits that it is war which is a detail of the gas chambers.” This syllogism is in the line Hitler’s language.
Today, this attack on the language is emulated. Trump uses logorrhea in all respects similar, even if the ex-president is neither warmonger nor exterminator. And the QAnon movement picks up similar linguistic and substantive elements, including anti-Semitism. In France, we are witnessing a semantic drift: does not a police union castigate the “harmful”?
“Historicizing Evil, A Critical Edition of Mein Kampf”
d’Olivier Mannoni.
Editions Fayard. €100.
Note from L’Echo:
d’Olivier Mannoni.
Editions Héloïse d’Ormesson. €15.
Note from L’Echo:
1691929318
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