Macleans magazine, dated 18th February 2008 contains a very interesting article by Kate Lunau, entitled Toxic words get their own dictionary. The article concerns the new German dictionary that catalogues hundreds of Nazi expressions that are now considered by the rest of that country and the free thinking world as toxic, due to their association with the Nazi Regime and the purely negative impact they had and still have on every country on earth!
The dictionary, entitled Wörterbuch der "Vergangenheitsbewältigung" (Dictionary of "Coming to Terms with the Past" will contain some one thousand or more expressions that are very specific and technical, employed by the Nazis while they carried out their genocide program for Jews, Pols and many other nationalities whom they considered unfit to live. Words like 'Arbeit macht frei' Work sets you free, 'Lager' Concentration Camp, 'Selektion' Selecting - which victims for immediate death, 'Endlosung' Final Solution and 'Entartete' Degenrate - used to attack modern art, among other things.
Just to use these words, {has it really been 63 years since the end of the Second World War!} conjures vivid reminders of the death camps and the horror of Germanys' genocidal past. This dictionary will serve as a monument to those millions who died, a commemorative event in history for the rest of the world and a postwar recollection for their younger generation.
There is still much fear lingering in the world of the merest possibility that what happened during the Great War will repeat itself. Although 63 years have past since the horrors ended, World War Two will always be in the back of our minds regardless of how antiquity alters the memories. This is a unique book which shows the world that Germany is grappling with its past and attempting to come to terms with it by recognizing what really happened and that it did, in fact, happen. These are not simply 'Nazi' words or words to be associated with the last World War, they represent an ideology of pure hate, the corruption of absolute power and the astonishing ability one man had to manipulate a nation. Are the German people now trying to understand their history and how their entire country could allow themselves to be swayed into believing the malignant ideas of a single man! There were many who openly disagreed with Hitler and his Third Reich; they disappeared for it! Still more hid Jews and other nationalities when the dangerous opportunity presented itself and they deserve recognition for those noble acts.
The world will always ask them how a nation of intelligent and civilized people could fall under the influence of person like Adolph Hilter was. Even if they could provide an acceptable answer, the world would still not understand it because any answer, no matter how logical, will remain incomprehensible to most minds around the globe. We are attempting to fathom the unfathomable! 63 years after the fact, we still see Hitler as a monster because on some level of our collective world psyche, we have begun to realize what the human race is really capable of doing to itself and it scares the crap out of us. We are left with the gnawing question: am I personally capable of doing this, myself? We do not want to know the answer for fear of what that answer would imply about each of us.
People fear this history will be forgotten; its just too terrible to remember! These events and the people who perpetrated them are forever, deeply etched into our psyches and will not be easily dislodged. There is too much fascination with The Nazis Final Solution, enough to continually guarantee the making of movies, more written books and combing history for answers. What exactly do we want to know? Which questions do we want answered? By whom? Who is supposed to take ownership for what happened?
The unknowable frightens the heck out of us! Yet, knowing to what extremes we are capable of, to severely injury one another, terrifies us even more. It calls the unbidden question 'What if...' screaming to our minds and if that is not enough to set our teeth on edge, it demands a justifiable reply. For as many years since the war ended there have been detractors trying to convince the world that this did not really happen and it was all an elaborate plan conceived by people who were trying to... What?! History records events as they unfold and if our memory fades, history records them accurately; there can no longer be any silence or amnesia, only open and honest confrontation of the truth. A truth the German people are attempting to face with this new Nazi dictionary, who in setting down these words in print, will have provided an unsettling posterity for its newer generation and the rest of the world. I wonder if the words 'Nazi' and 'Swastika' will be added to the book.
This article names as reference: Macleans magazine, dated 18th February 2008 article by Kate Lunau, Toxic words get their own dictionary, as written on February 6, 2008. Some text includes direct quotes.
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