Full Description
Just Language revisits the Weimar period and its representation in the postwar years to explore narratives of linguistic resistance in the works of Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Celan. How did this generation of exile writers grapple with their experiences of oppression and persecution? How did they create a language of resistance during the decades that prepared the Third Reich and the Shoah?
Facing the devastations of World War I, the book explores how Walter Benjamin analyzed language's ability to radically break the cyclical violence of war and examines his opposition to expansionism and imperialism in Weimar education and culture. Based on Benjamin's analysis, Johannßen traces the postwar responses of Hannah Arendt and Paul Celan. While Arendt proposed strategies of metaphorical thinking to counteract the formation of totalitarianism, Celan mobilized silence as a poetic counterforce against oppression and erasure. Just Language argues that every linguistic act and practice, no matter how small or marginalized, entails the ethical task of opposing the normalization and institutionalization of political violence. By tracing how Benjamin and his interlocutors struggled against German fascism, Johannßen presents a memory-based critique of linguistic violence, opening a dialogue between German-Jewish writers and today's debates on nondiscrimination, propaganda, and social justice.
Contents
Abbreviations
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: German-Jewish Exile and the Justice of Language
1 Toward the Critique of Linguistic Violence
Political Resistance and Anti-Oppressive Language in Benjamin's Early Essays
2 Decolonial Pedagogy
Fairy Tales and the Expansionism of Weimar Education
3 Just Philology
Traumatic Names and Anti-Fascist Memory in Benjamin and Adorno
4 Language in Exile
Arendt and Benjamin on Linguistic Plurality, Metaphors, and Antipropaganda
5 Poetic Counterforce
Silence and Objection from Brecht to Celan
Epilogue
Bibliography
