[NOT HUMOR] My idea for a new party game: "Who said it? Hitler or Trump?"

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Later this evening I am teaching a weekly Biblical studies/theology group through Zoom, which I often introduce with a teaser question or some thought-provoking exercise. I rarely focus on politics (neither in my theology teaching nor in this forum) but in view of the gravity of our times—and recent events in American politics—I’ve decided to introduce tonight’s Zoom class session with two discussions:

(1) How did Hitler and the Nazis foster support among Germans who called themselves Christians? And what controversial question among historians is associated with the calendar date of Kristallnacht? (Was the associations with the calendar date a deliberate strategy of the Nazis or just a convenient coincidence.?)

(2) “Let’s play a game. Who said it: Hitler or Trump?” Here’s the quotations I have so far. (Perhaps readers have some additional suggestions.)

“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country . . ."

“We must first root out the causes which led to our collapse and we must eliminate all those who are profiting by that collapse . . . "

*“It is a very sad thing for our country. It’s poisoning the blood of our country. It’s so bad, and people are coming in with disease." *

“The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within."

“It’s the blood of our country; what they’re doing is destroying our country.”

For readers who would accuse me of having an agenda, I’ll just say that I agree. I eschew hatred, racial/ethnic bigotry, and especially the hypocrisy of associating Jesus with ominous ideas which have nothing to do with his teachings. I will also say that I’ve been a registered Republican and a Bible-affirming Evangelical Christ-follower since before most readers were born. (I’m not a “godless liberal”, “pinko”, “leftist”, or whatever knee-jerk label some would casually banter about towards anybody they don’t like.) I certainly do not take recent events lightly. I’ve read a great deal of German history, some of it in the original language. As much as I am cautioned by the reality of Godwin’s Law, I can’t help but be alarmed at the obvious danger recent events represent.

Moreover, what alarms me most is NOT that we have in America quite a number of politicians who are entirely comfortable with such alarming rhetoric (or, at least, try to minimize the significance of the rhetoric by calling it “unhelpful” or just “poorly chosen words.”) No, I’m horrified that so many millions of Americans, especially millions of Americans who claim an affiliation of some sort with Jesus, are not at all horrified by such language.

If my viewpoint and grave concerns are unsupported by the facts, I am very happy to be corrected.

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Your first quote is a gimme, as it promises to root out fascists, which Hitler never would have done. The third is also simple, since Hitler (as well as his translators) generally conformed to grammatical rules. The others, though, could be either.

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Some caught that immediately and some didn’t, probably because there’s a lot of people who don’t know what fascist means. (I think many Americans would define a fascist as simply “a bad person.”)

My hunch is that Trump considers grammatical rules to be fascist. He considers himself accountable to no one.

None of my students were aware that Hitler’s propaganda often blamed Jews for lice and typhus.

Agreed. The second one came from Hitler but one can certainly find paraphrases of it in Trump’s speeches. All of the others were direct quotations from Trump.

None of my students got this one. The answer is that some commentators note the fact that Kirstallnacht occurred on Martin Luther’s birthday, a day recognizing a hero of German culture and a “founding father” obviously popular with Protestant Germans. He produced the first dictionary of the German language, thereby creating a German language standard that could serve as the foundation for his Bible translation.

Personally, I strongly disagree with those who believe Kristallnacht was timed to correspond with Luther’s birthday, though some Nazis may well have found it a convenient coincidence. The Nazis liked to cite Luther’s diatribes against the Jews (from late in his career) even though Luther’s anger toward the Jews was about religious, not racial/ethnic differences.

I noticed that Christian journalist (and strong critic of political trends among American evangelicals) Tim Alberta sees the Luther birthday association as a Nazi strategy but it is my understanding that the view is now relatively rare among historians of 1930’s Germany.

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Not challenging the claim, I’m just curious, because as someone with scarce familiarity with history of language I’m struggling to find a source on Luther authoring the first German dictionary, a German dictionary to aid in him translating the Bible, or, indeed, any German dictionary at all. Would you happen to have a citation for this on hand?

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While that’s true, it is also the case that Luther’s views in terms of what should be done to and about the Jews was pretty much straight in-line with Nazi policy. So while there may have been different reasons for their positions, the positions were pretty close.

I’ve always thought that Luther and Thomas More were strange personalities, in terms of how they are usually thought of. Both are thought of as heroes in relation to freedom of conscience. Both of them were involved in the deadly persecution of those with whom they had religious differences. One could find better heroes in that area.

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As for the party game, I’d add another dimension to it by throwing Bill Griffith’s “Zippy the Pinhead” into the mix. Many of Trump’s utterances are hard to distinguish from his, too.

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Excellent questions. I should have been far more precise in an effort to more accurately capture what I learned under J. Samuel Preuss back in the mid-1970’s. There was no formally published “Martin Luther’s Dictionary of the German Language” per se but here’s what I recall us being taught:

(1) In order for Martin Luther to produce a German language Bible translation that would meet the needs of Christians throughout a land of many and varied German dialects, he had to undertake a herculean study of the German language and seek to create a standard German that would largely reflect the Middle German dialect of the royal Saxon court and yet would be generally comprehensible to all literate and semi-literate German people and not just the ultra-educated throughout German-speaking lands. (There had been some previous German translations of the Bible in limited distribution but they were not easily read or understood by the average German throughout the many German states/provinces.)

(2) There were also in existence various “standard reference works” for Latin-to-German “theological translation” but Luther revised them extensively so that the German word equivalents would be far more accessible to the average German reader and more internally consistent. As in #1, I think they were basically “working papers” and I don’t recall if they were ever officially published by Luther himself (although I assume historians eventually published such miscellaneous papers within the Luther collected works.)

(3) The end result was that in the process of creating the “Luther Bible” (which has an historical and cultural significance in German culture and language evolution somewhat comparable to the King James Bible’s enormous influence on modern English), Luther compiled in the form of word lists and glossaries his own “standard working dictionary” of what evolved into modern standardized German. It was for Luther merely a means to an end (i.e., the goal of an easily readable, accessible to all German Bible translation) rather than an official dictionary to be published under his name.

My class notes from Dr. Preuss were lost long ago but I remember well a quotation he cited which I just now found online in Philip Schaff’s History of the Christian Church:

He [Luther] listened, as he says, to the speech of the mother at home, the children in the street, the men and women in the market, the butcher and various tradesmen in their shops, and, “looked them on the mouth,” in pursuit of the most intelligible terms. (Philip Schaff, [History of the Christian Church]

I remember Dr. Preuss saying that in this process Martin Luther compiled a “personal dictionary” of a sort which became the foundation of his Bible translation and thereby the roots of the modern German language. In that regard, it was dubbed, “the first modern German dictionary”, or something like that.

I have no idea how much of this was original to Preus’ scholarship and how much was the scholarly consensus of the time. (I earned a reasonable number of Church history credits but it was secondary to my primary focus of Biblical exegesis.) I mostly remember what I had to regurgitate on tests. I have assumed that this is a generally accepted consensus because a few years ago not long before the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation I watched a documentary at a local Lutheran church which showed the usual dramatic reenactment of Luther working at his desk translating the Bible. The narrator included the familiar claim about Luther having to compile his own “German dictionary” in order to make his translation comprehensible to the average German. Nevertheless, I doubt that one can find an officially published “Luther Dictionary of the German Language.” (However, it wouldn’t surprise me if Luther published a small subset of that working dictionary as a “theological glossary” to help clarify why particular German words were chosen to render particular Latin Vulgate words.)

As limited as it is, that’s all that I can recall on this topic as an old man who has forgotten more than he can remember. Excellent question.

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Indeed, especially if one is speaking of Luther’s writings late in his career. Yes, Luther was a very convenient go-to-source for the Nazis.

"Are we having fun yet?"™

And let’s not forget Lippy, the twin-brother of Zippy. (He surely deserves at least a cabinet appointment.)

The Discourse Software says it has been five months since Puck’s last post. Welcome back.

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My favorite Zippy the Pinhead quotation:

“All life is a blur of Republicans and meat!”

(I say that as someone who still has a Republican Party voter registration. I’ve kept it intact because it allows me to at least pose token opposition to Trump in various primary elections.)

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It’s been a weird five months. Wife had, and now evidently does not have, cancer. Daughter got in to Haverford College. My head has not stopped spinning or my heart racing, but things are calming down.

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Wishing you a simpler 2024. Welcome back! :smiley:

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Hope this year is a better one.

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Thanks, fellas. It is a better one so far, for sure. The Haverford admission was, of course, excellent news (she got in via the “early decision” round), but the lead-up to that was a bit stressful, as everyone seems to think right now that it’s a good idea to scare kids into thinking that all that a raft of AP classes, a great SAT score and a 4.0 GPA will get you is a swift kick in the ass at college admissions offices. I always thought she’d get in almost anywhere she wanted, but it was hard not to listen to the nay-sayers sometimes.

My wife did indeed have endometrial cancer but the definitive diagnosis came only AFTER the surgery, and the verdict seems to be that she detected it early and that the surgery got all of it. Obviously such conclusions are always a bit guarded and monitoring is required, but she didn’t even need a round of chemo or radiation and probably will see no recurrence. So, while nobody likes to have a loved one get cancer, this is about as gentle a ride as you can get if it has to happen to your family. Still scary.

So, all good outcomes. But we are hoping for a less frightening and stressful '24. The Orange Peril is, of course, trying to scuttle that hope.

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