Political Languages in the Age of Extremes

This volume explores the relationship between language and political power in the Age of Extremes. Topics include leadership cults under Stalin and Mussolini, depictions of enemies, secret diary-writing under Nazism, and the defence strategies of Soviet party members and Gestapo prisoners.

PART I. INTRODUCTION ; 1. New Perspectives on the Study of Language and Power in the Short Twentieth Century ; 2. Politics as Linguistic Performance: Function and 'Magic' of Communicative Practices ; PART II. THE RISE OF THE DICTATORS AND THE SEMANTICS OF LEADERSHIP ; 3. Fascistese: The Religious Dimensions of Political Language in Fascist Italy ; 4. Visualizing Political Language in the Stalin Cult: The Georgian Art Exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery ; PART III. MIND YOUR WORDS! POLICING LINGUISTIC BOUNDARIES (1920S-40S) ; 5. Revolutionary Selves: The Russian Intelligentsia from Old to New ; 6. Faced with Death: Gestapo Interrogations and Clemency Pleas in High Treason Trials by the National Socialist Volksgerichtshof ; 7. Policing Tonal Boundaries: Constructing the Nazi/German Enemy on the Wartime BBC ; 8. Keep Quiet ... But Tell!! Political Language and the 'Alert Citizen' in Second World War America ; 9. Telling the Truth: Counter-Discourses in Diaries under Totalitarian Regimes (Nazi Germany and Early GDR) ; PART IV. THE GROWTH OF LINGUISTIC AWARENESS IN THE COLD WAR ERA ; 10. The Unknown and the Familiar Enemy: The Semantics of Anti-Communism in the USA and Germany, 1945-75 ; 11. Semantic Strategies of Inclusion and Exclusion in the German Democratic Republic (1949-89) ; 12. War over Words: The Search for a Public Language in West Germany ; 13. The Return of Language: Radicalism and the British Historians 1960-90 ; 14. Suppression of the Nazi Past, Coded Languages, and Discourse of Silence: Applying the Discourse-Historical Approach to Post-War Anti-Semitism in Austria