37
Vocabulary
Before describing the new instability that I mentioned in the previous chapter, it is important to say something about the social environment that changed around us. It started with movement of people and new words.
“Antifascists” shot-up from the dormant social milieu like aggressive sprouts from un-tilled soil. Last year’s wheat became this year’s chaff and vice versa. Returned “prisoners of war” were a sorry sight and aroused palpable psychological pain among women and children. But for Sovietized authorities, the primary issue was clothing. “Prisoners of war” were ordered to find civilian clothing immediately because the wearing of uniform pieces was forbidden. Curiously enough, the prohibition did not seem to have anything to do with political branding whereby a prisoner of war arriving in civilian clothing would be an “antifascist” while a prisoner of war wearing a piece of uniform a “Nazi”. Rather, it had to do with canceling the past, which included suppressing sadness. Since officials associated “sadness” with seeing defeated and demoralized people wearing military rags, the rags had to go. Sadness was material: wrap the man in new cloth, lift the mood.
The social landscape provided men and women with new social wrappings that raised the importance of those who joined in. Thus, the new people belonged to the People’s Solidarity (Volkssolidarität) and the Communist Women’s Association (Kommunistischer Frauenausschuss ). For us bystanders it raised questions. Did the new vocabulary like antifascists (Antifaschisten ), prisoners of war (Kriegsgefangene), and solidarity of the people (Volkssolidarität) usher in a new beginning or did they just blind us again to what was really going on? Did the new words merely favor other people or did new people really appear? The German words for Antifascist, Prisoner of War, and People’s Solidarity entered my vocabulary even when I did not voice them.
But I knew one thing. Around me, those words were as bad as had been the Nazi word Community of One People (Volksgemeinschaft). “Propaganda and hubris,” mother said years later, “all of it.”
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