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Heterogeneous Resistance Cultures: Linguistic Practices of Resisting from 1933 to 1945

Subject Area Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
Term from 2018 to 2022
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 395401005
 
Final Report Year 2022

Final Report Abstract

The project „Heterogeneous Resistance Cultures: Linguistic Practices of Resistance from 1933 to 1945” has fulfilled the research desideratum often identified in linguistics. On the basis of a manual, sociopragmatically oriented annotation of 140 resistance texts as well as corpus linguistic analyses of the entire corpus (554 texts), it has been possible to work out the central lines of oppositional communicative practices against the Hitler dictatorship with their specific milieu ties, visions, contradictions, and developments before and during the Second World War. In the process, considerable differences emerge between the groups of military, bourgeois, communist, socialist, church-religious, and youth resistance with regard to the choice of text genres and linguistic implementation. Two tendencies could be proven in different evaluation steps: The linking to the respective own milieu-specific background of experience, which serves as a pivot for the critical view of the racist-nationalist Nazi measures, and the development of new situational patterns of language use, recognizable e.g. in phrases such as der blutige Kretin Hitler (the bloody cretin Hitler), mit allen demokratischen Kräften in Europa (with all democratic forces in Europe), Stimme des wahren Deutschlands (voice of the true Germany) etc. In addition, communicative procedures of communalisation or polemics were typical of the resistance, and some „resistance genres“ developed in the short term, such as resistance newspapers in exile. These forms of oppositional expression are characteristic of the reconstitution of groups in and as resistance, and in part they form the foundation stone for anti-fascist language in the post-war period. The results are based on annotations along a multidimensional communication model developed by Schuster 2018. The model encompasses the levels of self and relationship constitution, factual constitution, and patterns of counter-resistance action, which were marked in an innovative way not only independently of each other, but overlapping several times, so that sociocultural patterns for the individual resistance circles have become recognizable. The respective groupings differ, for example, in the way they call for resistance, what they refer to in their argumentation, or even in their way of forming counter-publics. The evaluation of multilayered patterns of language use of appealing, arguing, instructing, and mobilizing also establishes a relationship to the political discourses and traditions in which resistance arguments are embedded. It correlates the linguistic with regard to the changeability and complexity of resistance motives with the situation in imprisonment, in captivity, in exile, etc. The project results are summarized in a monograph, two anthologies and other individual publications.

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