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Borrowed Fatherland: Nationalismand Language Purism in Fichte'sAddresses to the German NationDavid Martyn aa Columbia UniversityPublished online: 30 Mar 2010.

To cite this article: David Martyn (1997) Borrowed Fatherland: Nationalism and LanguagePurism in Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation , The Germanic Review: Literature,Culture, Theory, 72:4, 303-315

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THE GERMANIC REVIEW

Borrowed Fatherland: Nationalism and Language

Purism in Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation

DAVID MARTYN

hat follows has its origin in a personal fascination with an aspect of his- W torical linguistics I came across some time ago that seemed to have sur- prising consequences for our conceptions of linguistic identity and of what it means to translate from one language into another. I mean the so-called calques, or loan translations, words that seem to be made of domestic linguistic elements, such as superman or normal school, but which were in fact coined as literal, part- for-part translations of foreign words: Ubermensch and kcole normale. The im- mediate effect of this simple phenomenon is to disturb the clarity of the distinc- tion between foreign and domestic words. When what looks like a domestic word turns out to be not originally German but translated from a foreign language- einwundern from Latin immigrure-then a foreign origin suddenly appears be- neath what had seemed natively German, and the line separating the domestic from the foreign is upset.

This curiosity of language is of particular concern where, as in the nationalist theory of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, national identity is seen as depending on the purity of a nation’s language. When the German language appears as the soul of what is German, any displacement of the line between the native and the adopt- ed or foreign elements in the language will disturb the identity of the German na- tion as well. And when the relationships at work in the constitution of this na- tional identity are strongly gendered-Fichte depicts the German language as the “mother tongue” that gives birth to the “fatherland” of Germany-then the re- liance on questionable assumptions about linguistic purity tums out to involve an equally vulnerable reliance on the stability of gender. Uncovering hidden dis- placements of such seemingly natural and immutable distinctions as those be- tween domestic and foreign words or between mother and father makes visible

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the fault lines in the construction of national identity and with them the ideolog- ical structures on which that national identity is based. Fichte’s nationalism pro- vides a particularly apt example of how such displacements are manipulated and obscured.

The notion of the foreign word as a paradigm of the foreigner is voiced in particularly unforgettable fashion in one of Adorno’s more widely cited apho- risms: “Foreign words are the Jews of language.”’ Fichte would probably have liked this analogy, at least to the extent that he seems to have felt as hostile to- ward Jews as he did toward foreign words. “Over almost all the countries of Europe,” Fichte wrote in 1793, “a powerful, hostile state is spreading that is forever at war with the other states and in some countries oppresses the citizens with a terrible weight: I mean the Jews. . . . Has the thought not occurred to you that the Jews, who independently of your citizens make up a state that is more solid and more powerful than all your states put together, will, if you also grant them citizenship in your countries, fully decimate your other citizens?”2 Fichte’s famous “state-within-a-state” invective charges Jews with undermin- ing the sovereignty of the states in which they reside by belonging already to another, competing state. It is a state whose unmatched power derives from the prestige of its citizens’ lineage: “[Elven the lowest [Jew] can trace his ances- tors further back in time than we can our entire history, and can claim an emir as the founder of his stock that is older than our hist01-y.”~ The Jews have a longer history than the Germans, or more precisely, they have precedence in a history that is inseparable from the Germans’ own, for they can claim a more intimate connection to the Old Testament-a text that belongs to the Germans’ cultural heritage as well. They are part of “a legend that we have ourselves adopted into our articles of faith.”4 Jews, in other words, are the direct descen- dants of a civilization that is not only older, but also carries a particular au- thority for German cultural identity itself.

In this the Jews are indeed similar to foreign words as Fichte conceives of them. In his Addresses to the German Nation (1808), written some fifteen years after the treatise on the French Revolution that contains the previously quoted anti-Semitic passage, Fichte argues that the Germans as a people owe their identity to the uniqueness of their language. The Germans, he warns, should not fall prey to the seductiveness of foreign words, which persuade by means of their “foreign, fashionable, and harmonious sound” and the “prestige of antiquity and of foreign c~untries.”~ Like the Jew, the Latin or Greek for- eign word belongs to an older civilization, one that has been adopted via neo- classicism into German culture itself. Jews and foreign words are similar in that both retain a special connection not just to something foreign but to a for- eignness integral to the domestic. They draw attention to a split between the domestic and the foreign that is internal to the projected purity of the domes- tic itself.

It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that Fichte’s Addresses to the Ger- man Nation contains conspicuously few foreign words. Written in an antiquated,

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Lutheran style that differs noticeably from that of his earlier works, Fichte’s Ad- dresses seems to resist foreign influence not only on its ideas but also on its lan- guage. In the Addresses, it would seem, Fichte places great importance on avoid- ing linguistic borrowings and on speaking a pure German.

But what in fact does it mean to speak German? And what is a foreign word? The expression “foreign word” (Fremdwort) is not in Fichte’s vocabulary. It

appears for the first time, according to Hermann Paul’s Deutsches Worterbuch, in 1819, in the third edition of Jean Paul’s Hesperus. In the preface to that edi- tion, Jean Paul claims of his own “ever germinating root-words” that they “stifle and cast into shadow the foreign words [Fred-Worter] that are like short-lived seeds scattered by the wind.”6 Jean Paul clearly shared Fichte’s distaste for for- eign words, although elsewhere he was notably more tolerant of them. “In itself,” he writes in his Vorschule der Asthetik (1804), “the birthplace of a language, this second organ of the soul, is indifferent to us as soon as we understand it . . . ; why should we prize native sounds more than a superior education through foreign ones?”7 In a chapter on Joachim Heinrich Campe’s attempts at linguistic purifi- Cation-Campe had published a dictionary of foreign words with suggestions for German equivalents that could be substituted for them in 1801*-Jean Paul dis- tinguishes between what he feels are happy or useful attempts at purification and useless or harmful neologisms. For example, replacing the foreign word Elek- trizitiit with the German neologism Reib-Feuer (literally, “fire by friction”) seems to him a step backward, since the latter has no morphological flexibility, whereas Elektrizitat can easily form a verb, elektrisieren, and an adjective, elek- trisch. Other attempts at inventing Germanic equivalents of foreign words meet with Jean Paul’s approval, such as Schneesturz (literally, “snow-plunge”) for the Latinic Lauwine, “avalanche”; Supbriefchen, “sweet little letter,” for the French billet-doux; or-to cite an example that has survived in contemporary German- folgerecht (fromfolgen, “to follow”) for konsequent (“logically consistent,” from Latin con + sequi, “to follow”). On the whole, then, Jean Paul, like Fichte, prefers to avoid “foreign words” where possible and to use what he and Campe call “German equivalents” (Verdeutschungen) instead.

These “German equivalents” are all examples of what the philologist Werner Betz calls “loan coinages” (Lehnpriigungen), that is, words that are German in construction but which in all likelihood would never have been coined, or would never have acquired their modem meaning, were it not for the influence of a for- eign model. As a rendering of konsequent, the German neologism folgerecht is built after the Latin. Betz distinguishes between several different kinds of loan coinages. For example, there are what he calls “loan meanings” (Lehnbedeutun- gen), German words that have undergone a fundamental change in meaning in order to translate a foreign word. Geist, for instance, meant “enlivening force or power” in pre-Christian times and came to mean “spirit” only as a translation of Latin spiritus. Then there are the so-called loan transfers (Lehniibertrugungen), such as Gegenstund, ‘‘object” (literally, “a stand against”) for Latin objecturn (from ob +jucere, “to throw before”). Such words consist entirely of German el-

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ements based loosely on a foreign model (the more literal Gegenwurf, “throw against,” which was the first attempt in German at translating objecturn, proved short-lived). Lastly, there are the loan translations I mentioned at the outset, words that are literal, part-for-part translations of foreign terms, such as Jungfern- rede for maiden ~ p e e c h . ~

As a result of these various kinds of borrowing, Betz replaces the tradition- al distinction between native and foreign words with a more fundamental dis- tinction between inherited linguistic material (Erbgut) and loaned linguistic material (Lehngur), whereby the latter category contains both foreign words and thousands of loan coinages that would never be identified as “foreign” by any German speaker but a philologist. Indeed, pointing out the extent to which German consists of loan coinages seldom fails to astonish speakers of Ger- man. Betz, one of the pioneers of research into the various forms of linguistic borrowing, exploits this effect by beginning one of his best-known articles as follows:

There are sentences that would sound fully German to a superficial zealot of the “pu- rity” of the German language, but in which not a single word, or in any case no noun, verb, or adjective, is originally German. Consider for example the sentence: “Am vergangenen Freitag nahm der GroSvater des Herzogs, mit Rucksicht auf die Beschwerden der Untertanen, an einer Sitzung in der Hauptstadt teil” [Last Friday the grandfather of the duke, with regard to the complaints of the subjects, partic- ipated in a meeting in the capital]. The only “German” words in this sentence are the articles and prepositions; all the other words are translations based on a foreign model. Vergangen is a loan transfer after Latin praeteritus, Freitag is a loan transla- tion of Veneris dies, GroJvater is from grand-ptre, Herzog [which means “duke” and is formed from the German words Heer, “army,” and Zoge, “leader” or “puller”] is from Byzantine-Greek strarelites, Rucksichr is from respectus. Beschwerden [“complaints,” formed from schwer; “heavy”] borrowed its specific meaning from gravamina, Untertan is a loan transfer after subditus, Sitzung is used here in a rnean- ing borrowed from French skssion, Hauprsradr is a loan transfer after capitale, reil- nehmen is a loan translation of Latin participere. l o

The number of words in modem German that owe their formation to a foreign model is quite high. Old High German alone, Betz shows, contains thousands of loan coinages, and while many of these early borrowings did not survive for long, the borrowing process has never broken off. Indeed, many words that we tend to regard as originally and specifically German are in fact “loaned” from other lan- guages. Take, for example, the word Bildung, which English speakers know from the foreign word Bifdungsromn. The very fact that we say, in English, “Bil- dungsroman” and not some English equivalent, even when we are talking about an English novel, would seem to indicate that the term is in some sense untrans- latable or essentially German in nature. But it turns out that Bildung in German owes its formation to a double foreign influence. Coined as a translation of imag- inatio to mean “idea” or “conception,” it later acquired the pedagogical sense that it has in the word Bifdungsroman under the influence of the English wordfor- mation, for it was first used with that meaning, as we learn from the

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newest edition of Jean Paul’s Deutsches Worterbuch, in a translation of Shaftes- bury to render the phrase, “The formation of a genteel character.”

If loan coinages are as widespread as Betz shows, then the question of lin- guistic purism poses itself in a new way. The “purity” or “independence” of a language is not simply a matter of assessing the number or importance of “for- eign words” that have been adopted into it. Rather, one must analyze the extent and the quality of various kinds of foreign influence. Einar Haugen, in his now classic article on borrowing, points out that attempts to classify languages ac- cording to their “receptivity,” or tendency to borrow from other languages, are often misled because they mistakenly identify loan translations-as well as other forms of what Haugen calls morphemic substitution-as native: “Some lan- guages import the whole morpheme, others substitute their own morphemes; but all borrow if there is any social reason for doing so.”” German, it would appear, falls into the latter category of languages that borrow by means of loan transla- tions. Whereas “the Romance languages, and to a large extent English. . . mined Latin and Greek for much of [their new] vocabulary,” the development of stan- dard German took a different approach, “accepting some of this Latinate vocab- ulary (along with many French borrowings), but self-consciously balancing them with internally generated German compounds-ften transparent calques like Femsehen modeled on tele-vision ( ‘distant-seeing’).”*2 German, in other words, “borrows” as much as other languages, but it relies to an unusual degree on loan coinages when doing so.

To what extent German is “pure” depends, then, on how one views these trans- lated borrowings: as instances of corruption by a foreign source or, to the con- trary, as examples of the German language’s unusual ability to create new forms using its own elements-to appropriate foreign concepts with its own linguistic stock. Campe, the most prominent of German language purifiers among Fichte’s contemporaries, was clearly of the opinion that translated words were legitimate additions to German vocabulary. “Literal translation, especially of figural or composite words, from other languages, [is] a means of enrichment that all peo- ples have always considered to be both permitted and necessary. The Greeks translated from the oriental languages; the Romans-as witnessed especially by Cicero’s writings-from Greek; the French, the English, the Spanish from both; why shouldn’t we do the same?”I3 What Betz calls a loan translation is not, for Campe, the introduction of a foreign element into German, but its appropriation by German. By translating words rather than importing them part and parcel, Campe believes, German preserves its own identity.

This view of loan coinages is by no means peculiar to the early nineteenth cen- tury. Hans Eggers, in his classic History of the G e m n Language (written from 1963 to 1977), sees an example of the German language’s unusual inventiveness and independence in the semantic history of the words Con, “God,” and Herr, “Lord.” Both of these words are, in Betz’s terminology, loan meanings (Lehnbe- deutungen), for although the words themselves are German, they underwent a

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fundamental change in meaning under the influence of deus and senior during the period of Chri~tianization.’~ Eggers comments,

The Germanic expressions are made from domestic linguistic material. That is not a matter of course, and it deserves to be recorded on the page of glory of the Germanic mind that it made the foundation of Christianity, the monotheistic concept of God, linguistically utterly its own. (1 1

Instead of forcing onto the pagan language both the foreign concept and the for- eign word-as in French, for example, where deus and senior gave rise to dieu and seigneur-the early Christian translators found already extant German words to render the new meanings. Just the sense was introduced, without alter- ing the familiar sound of the domestic language. In this way, the domestic lan- guage is seen as having kept its independence and demonstrated its strength: it made the foreign concept “linguistically utterly its own.”

But it seems difficult to overlook the fact that while the German word is being preserved, it is also being altered, and fundamentally so. Got? may have been a German word to begin with, but it did not mean what it came to mean except under the influence of deus. Such “translations” do not just mediate between one language and another; they have a profound and lasting effect on the shape of the host language. Eggers himself emphasizes this fact when he praises the inven- tiveness of the early translators:

To assimilate classical and Christian cultural material, and, what is still more, to master it in one’s own mother tongue, such was the task that [Charlemagne] set in his cultural policy. . . . It is hard to imagine, looking back from the heights of what has been accomplished and secured through ages of intellectual struggle, the endless and agonizing toils of the beginning period. Today, when a just somewhat talented 12th-grader translates his Cicero without much difficulty, and when the young the- ology student effortlessly renders the Greek or Latin biblical text in his mother tongue, they owe the (relative) ease with which they translate to the immeasurably more difficult work on the development of the German language that was carried out by scholars in the age of Old High German. (SO)

Students learn to “translate” objectum with Gegenstand, misericordia with Bannherzigkeit; but the language into which they translate has been developed in large part for the express purpose of rendering just those terms. What seems to be a fortuitous isomorphism turns out to be merely genealogical: the German word fits the Latin word so perfectly only because the Latin word is its ancestor. While students have the impression of finding an equivalent, in an independent- ly extant language, of ideas expressed in another tongue, in fact they are merely repeating equivalences that were made and not discovered.

As a result, German appears not as a natural language that has developed ac- cording to its own intrinsic laws but as a construction, an artifact that owes its ex- istence to the influence of the foreign languages it only seems to translate. For translation implies that two languages are involved from the outset: one translates from one language into another. But what Eggers describes is more like the cre-

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ation of one language under the influence of another. German became the lan- guage it is, Eggers’s account implies, because it was unable to translate the for- eign without fundamentally altering the domestic. Since a translation that alters the host language is said to be forced and thus unsuccessful, this would mean that German, strictly speaking, was unable to translate at all. Instead of demonstrat- ing an unusual strength or independence from foreign influence in its unique ability to translate, the domestic language, here, is the product of a failure to translate. German, one might say, is the result of the impossibility of translating Greek and Latin into it.

If that sounds odd, it is perhaps because the whole notion of linguistic bor- rowing, whether in the form of foreign words or of loan coinages, is misleading: what occurs is not simply a matter of one language “taking” an element from an- other “into” itself, but always of one languageforming itself, that is, changing its very identity, under the influence of a so-called foreign language. It is in this sense that Uriel Weinreich, drawing on the work of Hans Vogt, begins his influ- ential book on language contact by quietly declaring the notion of borrowing ob- solete. He replaces it with the concept of “interference,” a term that acknowl- edges to what extent every “loan” is not merely an addition to but a reorganization of the “receiving” language, of its core system of patterns and structures. While “borrowing,” Weinreich writes, might still be used when the transfer of a single element as such is to be stressed, “even there the possibility of ensuing rearrangements in the patterns, or interference, cannot be excluded.”16

The consequence is that not just the notion of borrowing but the very notion of discrete languages appears to be in need of correction. As Andr6 Martinet puts it in his cogent preface to Weinreich’s book, “What we heedlessly and somewhat rashly call ‘a language’ is the aggregate of millions o f . . . microcosms many of which evince such aberrant linguistic comportment that the question arises whether they should not be grouped into other ‘languages.’ . . . Linguistic diver- sity begins next door, nay, at home and within one and the same man.”” The “do- mestic” language is diverse-foreign-from the start; what is, in Eggers’s phrase, “utterly one’s own” is always someone else’s, too. As a result, since the concepts of “borrowing” and of discrete “languages” are no longer valid, the very notion of “purity,” which depends on them, becomes obsolete as well, and the question of linguistic purism ceases even to make sense. If one insists on posing it, the closest thing to an answer one can expect is a contradictory formulation such as the awkward idea that what makes German unpure is German itself.

hile the modem terminology used to analyze loan coinages did not exist W when Fichte wrote, the phenomenon itself was obviously understood, as Campe’s approval of translating “figural and composite words” as a means of “enriching” the German language demonstrates. Fichte, too, is clearly aware of the phenomenon of loan coinages, though he differs with Campe on the question of whether they are a valid means of adding to a language’s vocabulary. In a lengthy discussion about the best way to express the concept humanitus in Ger-

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man (Reden 68-71), Fichte considers both the possibility of introducing a foreign word, Humanitiit, and what Betz would call a loan translation-Fichte calls it a “literal” translation-Menschlichkeir. He objects to the latter possibility as vehe- mently as to the first. Both forms of borrowing introduce a partly incomprehen- sible element into the language, and both, Fichte says, are unnecessary: German already has a word, Menschenfreundlichkeit (“kindness toward men”), that ade- quately expresses the same concept. Rendering humanitas as Menschen- freundlichkeit is an example of what Fichte calls a “translation into genuine true German,” “Ubersetzung in echtes wahres Deutsch.” For Fichte, evidently, Ger- man has no need of either foreign words or literal loan translations, both of which would compromise its purity.

For what disturbs Fichte about the introduction of foreign words into German has less to do with their sound-although that is part of it-than with their mean- ing, particularly when the word refers not to an object of the senses but to a su- persensible concept or abstraction. Such concepts, Fichte points out, can only be designated indirectly, by means of a symbol (Sinnbild) or figure that contains a comparison between a sensible thing and a supersensible idea. Since different linguistic communities have different ways of grasping and designating the sen- sible realm, one language’s comparison will not always be transparent to speak- ers of another. Drawing heavily on organic imagery, Fichte depicts language as rooted, as it were, in its native culture; if its metaphors are transplanted into an- other context, they can lose their footing in the sensible world. In the tradition of Kant’s dictum that “one only fully understands what one can oneself make,”18 Fichte argues, in essence, that the figural dimension of a language is completely comprehensible only to the culture that created it. Whether translated or not, words that are borrowed by a foreign linguistic community are likely to retain an incomprehensible core. They will cloud the natural lucidity of the host language and “enshroud the hearer in darkness and incomprehensibility” (7 1).

This incomprehensibility is normally limited to the words a language borrows, but it can also befall a language in its entirety when the language as a whole is appropriated by another culture. That is what happened, Fichte tells us, when the Latin countries were conquered by Germanic peoples. As conquerors, the Ger- manic settlers-the Franks, the Burgundians, and so forth-preserved their own “circle of observation” of the sensible world. But by adopting the language of the people they conquered, they began to use metaphors that they themselves did not understand:

For the conquerors that acquire the language later, the verbal image contains a com- parison with an observation of the senses that they have either passed over long pre- viously without the accompanying mental development, or else have not yet had, and perhaps never can have. The most that they can do in such a case is to let some- one explain to them the verbal image and its spiritual significance; but in this way they receive only the flat and dead history of a foreign culture, and in no way a cul- ture of their own. They get symbols which for them are neither immediately clear, nor able to stimulate life, but which must seem to them entirely . . . arbitrary. . . . For them, this advent of history, and nothing but history, as expositor, makes the lan-

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guage dead and closed in respect of its whole figural sphere, and its continuous on- ward flow is broken off. (67-68)

A living language is one continually spoken by those who made it; only they can fully understand its figures and can continue to create new figures from the lan- guage’s original stock. The inhabitants of the Latin countries conquered by Ger- manic tribes-the French, although Fichte never names them-had this creative, “living” continuum cut off when the dominant class of their culture was replaced by those who did not make but merely acquired its language. Any further develop- ment to the language that the conquerors contributed afterward was grafted, as it were, onto what had become a consummated, closed-off (abgeschlossen) idiom. While the language may continue to show an “appearance of life” thanks to their creativity, it “nevertheless contains a dead element deeper within it; with the intro- duction of a new circle of observation and the cutting short of the old one, it is sev- ered from the living root.” It becomes “a dead and incomprehensible language” (68). This is the essential difference between French and German. German, Fichte argues, has developed continually from “the original starting point of language as a natural force” (68). Viial ly unique among European languages-Fichte men- tions only Greek as a possible rival-it has been spoken “without interruption” (61) by the same people, and “no element has ever come into it that did not express an actual perception that had been made by this people” (66).

It is this uniqueness of the German language that Fichte invokes to prove the uniqueness of the people that speaks it. In a strangely sublime tautology, Fichte first defines a living language as one continually spoken by the same people, and then defines a “people” as human beings (Menschen) who “continually form their language in continuous communication with one another” (62). The Ger- mans are such human beings. They are “an original people [ Urvolk], one that has the right to call itself the quintessential people [dus Volk schlechtweg], as op- posed to other tribes that broke off from it” (106). The word Germun means, for Fichte, those individuals who are caught up in the self-creative flow that is the life of language: “All those who are themselves alive, creatively bringing forth the new. . . are original men; they are, when they are viewed as a people, an orig- inal people, the quintessential people, Germans” (121). “It follows,” Fichte con- cludes, “that only the German, the original man, who has not lost his life through some arbitrary act of constitution, truly has a people and the right to call on one. Only he is capable of a real and reasonable love of his nation” (125).

What is interesting about this form of nationalism, and about looking at it in the light of the analysis of linguistic borrowing, is not just that it exemplifies how erroneous notions of linguistic purity can lead to an aberrant chauvinism; it shows too the specifics of how the fantasy of linguistic and national uniqueness is played out in German. Since German, more than other languages, tends to bor- row in the form of loan coinages, it can use loan coinages to conceal the extent to which its vocabulary is of foreign extraction and to create the illusion among its speakers that the words they are using are natively “German.”

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The text of the Addresses itself offers countless examples of how prevalent this illusion can be. For example, when Fichte approves of expressing the concept hu- manilas with the word Menschenfreundlichkeit, he is clearly under the impres- sion that the latter is not a “borrowing”; he says it is a translation into “genuine true German.” But Menschenfreund, it turns out, is a loan translation of philan- thropos. What Fichte sees as a genuinely and truly German concept is really not German but Greek. The error is made possible by the phenomenon of the loan coinage, for it is difficult to imagine how Fichte would have made this mistake if German had, like English or French, adopted philanthmpos not as a loan coinage but as a foreign word (philanthropy). The foreign words so prevalent in the Ro- mance languages and in English remain recognizably foreign to any speaker with a rudimentary knowledge of the source languages. Loan coinages, on the other hand, look domestic. They are assimilated in such a way that their foreignness, while always potentially discoverable, is easily forgotten or repressed, even by speakers who are well versed in language history. The German language’s count- less loan coinages are in reality not loans but thefts,19 for the language that uses them is destined to forget to what extent the metaphors it relies on are borrowed. It keeps them as though they were its own.

In a way, then, if one were to accept the premises of Fichte’s argument, one might say that his attempt at defining a qualitative difference between Germans and other peoples on the basis of their language meets with an ironic success. Like other languages, German borrows concepts and metaphors from Latin and Greek; but unlike other languages, perhaps, German borrows in a way that makes it particularly easy for its speakers to forget the extent to which its vocabulary is .not “utterly its own.” In German as in other languages, the domestic is the for- eign, the I is the Other?O but what is made obvious in other languages by the for- eign appearance of their borrowings would remain, to an unusual degree, hidden in German. This would, then, constitute the specificity of the German language and hence the specificity of the German as such, since in the logic of Fichte’s ar- gument one is the basis of the other. What is German, Fichte’s text seems to end up showing, is what conceals and forgets the Other of which it is made.

To be sure, all of this holds true only if we accept Fichte’s argument about the difference between a language’s independently developed metaphors and those that it adopts or learns from others. But even if one suspends for a moment the question of whether the German language’s unusual richness in loan coinages has affected the peculiar development of German national self-consciousness, it is clear that Fichte’s text is shaped to an unusual degree by its unrelenting re- pression of the foreign provenance of its metaphors. Consider the following ap- peal to the reader’s patriotism, taken from the eighth address: “Moreover, it is still permitted to us, so far as I know, to speak to each other in the German lan- guage about the fatherland” (140). What makes this sentence so curious is that the wordfatherfund (Vaterfand) is not originally German at all but was coined as a loan transfer after Latin patria. In view of the etymology, it would seem not only not permitted but not even possible to “speak to each other in the German

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language about the fatherland,” for the word itself is not German-at least not in Fichte’s sense-since it contains a metaphor taken from Latin.

Read in this way, Fichte’s sentence takes on an odd, apparently unintentional irony; it uses a foreign term just as it insists on the importance of speaking Ger- man. Fichte would like to think of the self-creation of the German fatherland as a kind of absolute incipit in time: “Now, this making of itself deliberately [Dieses Sichselbstmachen mit Besonnenheit] . . . must have a beginning somewhere and at some moment in space and time. . . . We are of the opinion that, in regard to time, this is the very time, and that . . . in regard to space, it is first of all the Ger- mans who are called upon to begin the new era as pioneers and models for the rest of mankind” (53). But what Fichte claims as an original, natural, sponta- neous, and unique German identity-the fatherland-is in fact the iteration of an earlier act of linguistic creation. The metaphor-a rather catachresis, since he has no choice but to use this metaphor-that Fichte uses to describe the unique birth of the “fatherland” shows by its origins how the time and the place of the other instance already shape and alter the time of the first time itself.2’

Fichte would be right to insist on the importance of this instance of cultural in- fluence. “Fatherland,” in the logic of Fichte’s argument, is based on a metaphor or image specific to a “foreign” culture, one that figures the land of the people as the land of the father. In the context of the Addresses, that figuring is more than mere rhetorical ornament; it is crucial to the very notion of nationality. For Fichte’s theory of the nation is cast in terms of the interplay between the father- land and the purity of its mother tongue, the lingua matema, another metaphor of gender borrowed from the Latin. The very idea of the fatherland depends, in other words, on the notion that its language is something that can be more or less pure. For this purpose, only a feminine language will do.22 For if language were cast in the masculine role of the “inseminating” instance-the role Fichte ac- cords the fatherland-it would not be capable of being inseminated by either a “domestic” or a “foreign” source, of being more or less pure. For Fichte’s argu- ment to work, language has to be the feminine counterpart to a masculine na- tion.23 The nation, in Fichte, is framed in terms of a desire to ensure the domes- ticity of the mother (tongue) and to prevent it from receiving its words, metaphors, and concepts from anything but the one, legitimate (father)land.

The Addresses, in other words, sets forth less a theory of the nation than a fig- ural tale, an allegory in which peoples and their languages appear as more or less potent fathers and more or less faithful mothers in a contest for cultural domi- nance. But even as allegory, the Addresses is as aberrant as it would have been as theory: as Eggers’s account of the history of German demonstrates, and as Wein- reich’s notion of interference allows us to think, purity is not a concept that can be applied to languages at all. The metaphors of mother tongue and fatherland, which are the irreplaceable protagonists of Fichte’s allegory of the nation, are in- herently misleading.

What is remarkable in all this is the ease with which Fichte can write as though these “Latin” metaphors were original to his own cultural identity. His Address-

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3 14 MARTYN

es to the G e m n Nation is truly noteworthy in its ability to forget or to repress the foreignness of what it erroneously celebrates as “genuine” and “true” Ger- man. It would be tempting to explain this ideological failure in terms of the pe- culiarity of the German language’s linguistic borrowing, and to claim that the ef- ficiency with which Fichte can repress the foreign provenance of his concept of nationality is constitutive not of nationalism in general, but of German national- ism in particular. It would be tempting, in other words, to try to beat Fichte at his own game and to reconstruct the German nation not as one that has successfully resisted foreign influence but as one whose chauvinism can become particularly virulent because of the effectiveness with which it can repress the otherness of which the domestic is made. But ultimately that would be as faulty a construc- tion of German uniqueness as Fichte’s own. For even if it is true that the “lan- guage” we call German is particularly rich in loan coinages, that does not mean that other languages do not have their own ways of forgetting their foreign debts. Every language has its means of feeding the fantasy of linguistic purity. The re- pression of otherness that is carried out, in this text, by way of a culturally de- termined gendering of mother tongues and fatherlands is in all likelihood not pe- culiar to Germany, just as the text in which this repression is revealed is not nearly as German as it would like.

Columbia University

NOTES

1. T. W. Adomo, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen uus dem beschddigten Leben (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 195 1 ) 200. Except where otherwise noted, translations of foreign-language sources are my own.

2. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Schrifen zur Revolution, ed. Bernard Willms (Opladen: Westdeutsch- er Verlag, 1967) 114-15.

3. Schrifren zur Revolurion 114. 4. Ibid. 5. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Reden an die deufsche Nufion (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1978) 68.71,

Translations are my own, although I have borrowed freely from a translation of the work into Eng- lish: Addresses to rhe German Nation, trans. R. F. Jones and G. H. Turnbull (Chicago: Open Court, 1922).

6. Hermann Paul, “Fremd,” Deursches Worterbuch, ed. Helmut Henne and Georg Objartel, 9th ed. (Tiibingen: Niemeyer, 1992). Unless otherwise noted, information on the history of German words is taken from this source.

7. Jean Paul, Werke, ed. Norbert Miller, vol. 5 (Miinchen: Hanser, 1967) 307-8. 8. Joachim Heinrich C a m p , Wonerbuch zur Erklarung und Venieutschung der unserer Spruche

aufgedrungenen fi-emden Ausdriicke: Ein Ergunzungsband zu Adelungs Worrerbuche (Braunschweig

9. Werner Betz, “Lehnworter und Lehnpragungen im Vor- und Friihdeutschen,” Deursche Won- geschichte, ed. Friedrich Maurer and Heinz Rupp, 3rd ed., vol. 1 (Berlin: De Grunter, 1974) 135-39. Other linguists have suggested alternative typologies with different names: Betz’s “loan translation” corresponds roughly to Einar Haugen’s “loanshift”; “loan meaning” is the same as what is more tra- ditionally called a “semantic loan.” See Einar Haugen, “The Analysis of Linguistic Borrowing:’ Lan- guage 26 (1950): 21&31.

1801).

10. Betz 135. 11. Haugen 225.

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NATIONALISM AND LANGUAGE PURISM 315

12. J. Heath, “Borrowing,” The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, ed. R. E. Asher and

13. Campe 41. 14. Gott comes from the Germanic root *gudam, a participle and therefore a word of neutral gen-

der that could have had one of several different meanings: either “that to which one calls out” or “that to which one makes sacrifice,” or, in the event that the word is related to the verb gieJen, “to pour,’’ “that which is cast (as in a mold).” Herr was a comparative form meaning “more sublime” or “more noble” and was coined to translate senior, “the older one,” which had displaced dominus in secular usage. See Hans Eggers, Deursche Sprachgeschichte, vol. 1 (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1991)

15. In the original the passage reads, “Das ist nicht selbstverstiindlich, und es verdient auf dem Ruhmesblatt germanischen Geistes verzeichnet zu stehen, daB er sich die Grundlage des Christen- turns, den monotheistischen Gottesbegriff, sprachlich ganz zu eigen machte.”

16. Uriel Weinreich, Languages in Contact: Findings and Problems, 2nd ed. (The Hague: Mou- ton, 1963) I .

17. Andr6 Martinet, preface, Languages in Contact vii. 18. lmmanuel Kant, Kritik der Urreilskrufr, ed. Karl Vorltinder (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1924)

248. 19. “[Tlhe borrowing takes place without the lender’s consent or even awareness, and the bor-

rower is under no obligation to repay the loan. One might as well call it stealing” (Haugen 21 I). 20. Or, as Fichte says in The Science of Knowledge, “I = Not-1,” “lch = Nichr-lch” (Grundluge

der gesumfen Wissenschufrstehre, [Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 19881 27). The ideological failures of the Addresses can be attributed in large part to Fichte’s reluctance in the text to equate self and not-self, as he had in The Science of Knowledge. In the context of the Addresses, where the place of the ac- tive, free subject is occupied by the German people, the proposition “I = Not-I” would entail equat- ing Germans with non-Germans-something Fichte was not able to do. See my forthcoming article, Fichres romuntischer Ernst.

J. M. Y. Simpson, 10 vols. (Oxford: Pergamon, 1994) 1:393.

112-17.

21. Jacques Derrida, Limited fnc. (Paris: GalilBe, 1990) 120-21. 22. Campe exploits the feminine metaphor more colorfully than Fichte: So wie die Strenge der Sitten, Zucht und Ehrbarkeit, durch Verfeinerung, Standeserhohung und steigende Ueppigkeit gewohnlich vermindert werden: so lieB auch unsere Sprache, so wie sie vornehmer und eine Dienerinn der Gelehrsamkeit und der Hofe ward, von ihrer ehemahligen jungfraulichen Ziichtigkeit und Strenge allm%hlig nach; wurde w n Jahr zu Jahr freier und aus- gelassener im Umgange mit Fremdlingen, und es fehlte an [sic] Ende wenig, daB sie nicht alle Scham verlor, und, feilen Lustdimen gleich, sich einer schandlichen Vermischung mit jedem, ihr noch so fremden Ankommlinge, Preis gab. ( 5 ) 23. The one passage where Fichte strays from this pattern and speaks of the “motherland’ (Mut-

rerlund) is the exception that proves the rule: the passage (60) is concerned with ethnic rather than linguistic or national purity, so that “land,” used metonymically to designate the people in it, is in the position of what can be more or less pure. The text is consistent in feminizing any element to which the category of purity is to apply.

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