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The linguistic abridgements indicate an abridgement of thought which they in turn fortify and promote.
-Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
In downtown Vienna, there is a small square called the Jewish Plaza (Juden Platz). Right in the middle of this area stands a house-shaped marble monument devoted to the memory of sixty-five thousand of Austria's Jews who perished during the Holocaust. The names of various concentration camps to which these victims were relegated are carved around the foundation. On the paving in front of this symbolic "marble house" are three large inscriptions engraved in three languages: on the left German, on the right English, and in the middle Hebrew (see figures la, lb, and lc). The German one says, "Zum Gedenken an die mehr also 65.000 österreichischen Juden, die in der Zeit von 1938 bis 1945 von den Nationalsozialisten ermordet warden" (In commemoration of more than 65,000 Austrian Jews who were killed by the National Socialists between 1938 and 1945). When translated, so does the Hebrew one in the middle. Yet the English version reads: "In commemoration of more than 65,000 Austrian Jews who were killed by the Nazis between 1938 and 1945" (emphasis added).
Two years ago when I visited this monument for the first time, I did not pay the slightest bit of attention to that small linguistic discrepancy. However, last summer when I visited Austria again, I became intrigued with this peculiarity. To be exact, my curiosity was sparked when on the same day after visiting that site, I strolled into Thalia, Vienna's largest bookstore. Browsing shelves with social science and humanities literature, I stumbled upon a German translation of Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe, a 2009 book by the noted British historian Mark Mazower. The German edition of that book (Mazower 2009b), which has the same cover picture, is titled Hitlers Imperium: Europa unter der Herrschaft des Nationalsozialismus (Hitler's empire: Europe under the National Socialism rule) (see figures 2a and 2b).
I eventually decided to look deeper into the origin of this language oddity. The first thing one notices is that when English-speaking people write and talk about Germany of the 1930s and 1940s, more often than not they routinely use the word Nazi. Thus, in English we have books...