Geraldine Horan Knihy

This study shows that women involved in National Socialism in the years 1924 - 1934 developed and shaped a recognizable discourse which communicated and reflected their position and status within the NS movement. The analysis is based on a variety of text-types produced by members of NS women's organisations, and includes official correspondence, circulars, reports, pamphlets, monographs and articles from NS women's journals. It draws upon several areas of linguistic theory, including feminist linguistics, semantics, pragmatics and discourse analysis, and the salient features identified in the female discourse are placed within a sociolinguistic framework. While previous research into the language of the NS-system has largely ignored the possibility of a cohesive female discourse, the study supports the idea that this discourse was dynamic, and at times heterogeneous, whilst also displaying many self-defining and self-referential features. It is characterised by its ambiguities and apparent contradictions, which expresses separateness and difference, yet also solidarity with the NSDAP.

This volume contains selected papers from an international conference held at Queen Mary, University of London, on 10-11 November 2010. Interdisciplinary perspectives are provided on nationalism and anti-Semitism in English- and German-language contexts from the beginning of the German Second Reich (1871) to the end of World War II (1945).

The contributions to this volume explore eleven key developments in the external history of the German language, that is, the combination of social, political and cultural circumstances which influenced the language and its speakers. Some of these ‘landmarks’ are individuals or groups of people who have exerted influence over the language: Charlemagne, Luther, the early modern grammarians and lexicographers. Others are studies of particular periods, places or groups which have not found their place in more narrative accounts: standardisation in the nineteenth century, the role of Low German, the state of German at the Stunde Null in 1945. An overarching theme is the role of deliberate intervention in the development of German, whether it took the form of education, prescriptivism, purism or political manipulation. The essays, a number of which were originally delivered as lectures in the University of Cambridge and all of which are by specialists in the field, combine to provide a history of the German language in its social context.