This book presents an insightful account of the academic politics of the Nazi era and analyses the work of selected linguists, including Jos Trier and Leo Weisgerber. Hutton situates Nazi linguistics within the politics of Hitler's state and within the history of modern linguistics.

A physical chemist (Fritz Haber), a photographer (Josef Breitenbach), a cabaret artist (Georg Kreisler), two writers (Otto Alscher and Albin Stuebs), a pioneering scholar in Irish-German studies (John Hennig) and a Celtic philologist (Julius Pokorny) are the focus of this volume. What they have in common is a biography fractured by the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933. Six were forced into exile; the life of the seventh, the Romanian-German writer Otto Alscher, shows that even the biography of a Nazi sympathiser could be dislocated by the years of dictatorship. As the previously unpublished letters which are reproduced here show, Fritz Haber, a Nobel prize winner, spent ‘his last lonely months’ seeking a dignified way to leave the country to which he had once felt the deepest attachment. Although a prominent member of Germany’s academic élite, Julius Pokorny had to retire because of his Jewish ancestry in December 1935 and yet was allowed to continue publishing on ethnic themes until his exile in 1943. Albin Stuebs was forced to seek refuge in Prague and later England when his left-wing political convictions made him a certain target for the Nazis. Because of his marriage into a liberal Jewish family, John Hennig had to renounce all hope of an academic career in Nazi Germany and, after his exile to Ireland, struggled in straitened circumstances to support his family while at the same time developing into an unusually prolific scholar. Proof that exile may stimulate creative energy is provided by Josef Breitenbach, whose remarkable biography appears to show that loss and uprootedness may release otherwise undeveloped creative potential. Similarly, the flight of Georg Kreisler from Vienna in 1938 was the start of ‘a remarkable voyage of discovery’ which saw him grow into a major, if consistently undervalued figure in the world of post-war German cabaret.

This book consisting of 21 articles is the result of three different symposia held in Zadar (2013), Moscow (2014) and Strasbourg (2016) with focus on two major topics: Glottogenesis and Conflicts in Europe and Safeguarding and protection of European lesser-used languages as formulated in the 1992 EU-Charter. PART I: Univ. of Zadar GLOTTOGENESIS ON THE EUROPEAN CONTINENT: General Introduction (Ureland), Hamel: From the Ice Age to modern languages SOUTHERN EUROPE: Genesis of French (Schmitt), Italian (Agresti, Begioni) and Spanish (Lüdtke) SOUTH-EASTERN EUROPE: Genesis of Croatian (Socanac, Granic, Skelin Horvat/Simicic; Skevin/Markovic; Bulgarian (Choparinova) EASTERN EUROPE: Genesis of Russian (Oleinichenko, Iamshanova) CENTRAL EUROPE: Genesis of Germanic (Krasukhin) WESTERN AND CENTRAL EUROPE: Genesis of (Celtic): (Broderick) NORTHERN EUROPE: Genesis of North Sámi (Weinstock) PART II: Linguistic Institute of the Academy of Sciences Moscow Introduction (Ureland); Report on the Moscow Round Table (De Geer); The LSJ-Project (Steller) PART III: René Schickele-Gesellschaft and Council of Europe, Strasbourg Introduction (Ureland); Kalmyk (Bitkeeva); Latin (Merolle); Colloquium in Strasbourg (Woehrling)