“For let us keep one fact clearly in mind: the German language was not innocent of the horrors of Nazism. It is not merely that a Hitler, a Goebbels, and a Himmler happened to speak German. Nazism found in the language precisely what it needed to give voice to its savagery. Hitler heard inside his native tongue the latent hysteria, the confusion, the quality of hypnotic trance.”

— George Steiner

"The Hollow Miracle".
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

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George Steiner 74

American writer 1929–2020

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