Quite a lot if you’re a German bureaucrat.
As Angela Merkel and her interior minister, Horst Seehofer, traded rhetorical blows over the past two weeks in their clash over refugee policy, another war of words was raging behind the scenes among the faceless bureaucrats whose job it is to implement and name whatever policy emerges.
The issue: What to call Germany’s new refugee camps.
Part of the genius of the German language is the scope it offers to coin new phrases by combining two existing words into a neologism. Think schadenfreude, dummkopf or fahrvergnügen.
In the world of international politics, however, German wordplay quickly loses its humor. As with much else in modern Germany, blame the War.
The Nazis were enthusiastic, if unsubtle, wordsmiths who reshaped German in ways still felt today. A whole field of scholarship revolves around weeding out and debating terms and phrases used by the Nazis that are still rooted in the vernacular. (Fun fact: The seminal work in this tradition — “Lingua Tertii Imperii” — appeared in 1947 and was written by Victor Klemperer, a German of Jewish descent whose cousin, Werner Klemperer, played Colonel Klink on the U.S. sitcom “Hogan’s Heroes,” set during WWII.)
When they came to power in the 1930s, the Nazis introduced a flurry of official terms that at first sounded like innocuous bureaucratic jargon: Geheimstaatspolizei (better known by the acronym Gestapo), Schutzstaffel (“protection squad,” aka SS) and Konzentrationslager (“concentration camp”), to name but a few prominent examples.
It’s the legacy of the latter term that is giving Germany’s modern pencil-pushers the most headaches. Though the phrase “concentration camp” was first used by the British during the Boer War, it is universally associated with the Holocaust and Nazi terror.
Therefore, any use of the word Lager (the camp, not the beer) in official jargon, such as Flüchtlingslager (“refugee camp”), is fraught, especially when located on German soil. When in doubt, Germans often revert to what’s known as “Denglisch,” a combination of German and English. The German version of the reality show “I’m a celebrity … Get me out of here!” is known as the “Dschungelcamp” (“Jungle Camp”), for example.
The refugee camp discussion has offered plenty of grist for German comedians and commentariat.
Jan Böhmermann, a popular German television comedian, joked that officials are considering a host of possiblities, including: Freiheitsgefängnis (“Freedom Jail”), Sozialhaftcenter (“Social Detention Center”) and Gute Laune Lager (“Good Mood Camp”).
Topping the officials’ own proposals has been a challenge, however.
In recent years, they’ve floated “Hotspots” and Ankerzentren (“anchor centers”). More recently they tested euphemisms including Transitzonen (“transit zones”), Anlandeplattform (“disembarkation platform”) and Expresszentren (“express centers”).
A suggestion made during last week’s European summit — kontrollierte Zentren (“control centers”) — raised the most eyebrows.
“It’s not a term that can really be abbreviated,” quipped Mario Sixtus, a German filmmaker and author.
In German, the abbreviation “KZ” is synonymous with the concentration camps.
Despite all the angst over the word Lager, it’s not without its defenders.
“There were ‘Lager’ long before the Nazi period and it can have positive connotation,” wrote Matthias Heine, a columnist for the daily Die Welt, citing examples such as Ferienlager (“holiday camp”).
“To reduce [the word Lager] to its connection with the KZ is defamatory and proves nothing. There are plenty of arguments for and against stricter border controls, but the word Lager isn’t one of them.”
Original Article
Source: politico.eu
Author: Matthew Karnitschnig
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