Table Of ContentVolume 1
Dangerous Language — Esperanto
under Hitler and Stalin
Written by
Ulrich Lins
Translated by
Humphrey Tonkin
Dangerous Language — Esperanto
under Hitler and Stalin
“This book gives a carefully supported account of a crucial aspect of the
Esperanto movement’s history, focusing on political repression by totalitarian
regimes, especially those of Hitler and Stalin. It also sheds light on opposition
elsewhere and is eye-opening for anyone interested in language policy and global
communication.”
—Ulrich Ammon, Emeritus Professor of Germanic
Linguistics at Duisburg-Essen University, Germany
Ulrich Lins
Dangerous
Language —
Esperanto under
Hitler and Stalin
Ulrich Lins
Bonn, Germany
Translated by Humphrey Tonkin
ISBN 978-1-137-54916-7 ISBN 978-1-137-54917-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-54917-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956885
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Editorial Note
Transliteration from Russian and Ukrainian is based on the Library
of Congress system. To make it easier on the reader, in Russian family
names the ending ‘ii’ has been changed to ‘y’, and soft signs and diacritics
have been omitted. In the footnotes and bibliography, however, I have
followed standard Library of Congress transliteration. In references, in
general, a translation is added only if the original is not in Roman script;
names appear in the form used in the publication in question.
For individuals from East Asian countries the family name appears
first, and the given name follows.
In the notes the full title of a book is indicated only in the first refer-
ence in the chapter in question; in subsequent notes it appears in abbrevi-
ated form. For frequently cited works (among them EdE, EeP, PVZ), see
the list of abbreviations and, of course, the bibliography. Only in excep-
tional cases are electronic sources indicated (links were last checked on 28
September 2016) In the case of journal articles, the title of the periodi-
cal is normally followed by the volume number and year of publication.
Where pagination extends over the entire volume, I have not indicated
the specific issue in which the article appears.
U.L.
v
Preface
Every book has its history, this one included. Its earliest draft was p ublished
in 1973 by the publisher l’omnibuso in Kyoto, Japan. This version, little
more than a pamphlet, had a tiny print run, but a year later its contents
were printed as a section in the volume Esperanto en perspektivo. In 1975
an expanded version of the first edition appeared in Japanese translation,
the work of Kurisu Kei. It was published in Tokyo by Iwanami.
In 1988 a new, completely rewritten text was published—the result
of several years of research in a vast array of source material.1 It was my
desire to make an original contribution to research on the 100-year his-
tory of Esperanto, devoting particular attention to a specific aspect of
that history—an aspect long neglected, indeed regarded as something
of a taboo, even among Esperantists. The topic was the opposition and
persecution that Esperanto encountered for political and ideological rea-
sons. I wanted to describe the fate of the adepts of a language that, over
the decades, police, censors, nationalist ideologues and assorted dictators
had denounced as ‘dangerous’.
So I did not deal with the ‘internal’ history of the Esperanto m ovement
so much as with the hostile reactions that Esperanto and its speakers
1 It was published, in agreement with the Universal Esperanto Association, by the German p ublisher
Bleicher, and reprinted in 1990 in Moscow by Progress Publishers. In 1988 a German-language
version also appeared, and this was followed by translations into Italian (1990), Russian (1999),
Lithuanian (2005) and Korean (2013).
vii
viii Preface
had endured from political regimes and ideologies, particularly Nazism
and Stalinism. Likewise, it was not enough simply to limit the story
to a description of the ways in which Esperanto had been attacked: it
was important to present the arguments of its opponents and analyze
the motives that prompted political regimes of very different character
to harass the movement for Esperanto. Such motives could derive from
fundamental ideological positions or from concrete political interests.
In this same connection, I also tried to shed light on the attitudes of
the movement itself, and of individual Esperantists: without an aware-
ness of the origins of the language, the motives of Zamenhof, the modes
of recruitment and the theory and structure of the movement, we can
hardly hope to achieve an understanding of why Esperanto became such
an object of persecution.
New information, particularly archival material, has come to light
since the 1988 edition and the fall of the Berlin Wall in the follow-
ing year. So the present version of the study is different again. For the
English-language version, I have expanded the story into two volumes,
the first dealing with the persecution of Esperanto speakers and the sup-
pression of the language in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, and the
second describing the underlying causes of the demise of the language
in the Soviet Union and its revival, first in Eastern Europe and then in
Russia itself, after the death of Stalin and the gradual decline of the ideas
we associate with Stalinism.
The extraordinary story of Esperanto’s encounter with t wentieth- century
dictatorship raises many questions—questions that I attempt to address in
this study. What was it that was so provocative about Esperanto? Was it
the very existence of Esperanto as an international language or p rimarily
the way in which it was used in practice? What was the political and social
milieu in which Esperanto canvassed for its goal of a second language
for all people? What role was played by adaptability and self-confidence
in dealing with governments from which the movement hoped for
support but which it nevertheless had no wish to rely on? What was the
relationship between a ‘neutral’ language on the one hand and ‘ idealistic’
enthusiasts on the other? How did the Esperantists relate to supporters
of other goals aimed at worldwide solidarity, like pacifists, socialists
and communists? And how did the Esperantists react to the—often
Preface ix
unexpected—conflicts with their opponents? What lessons did they
carry away from the persecutions concerning their own definition of the
Esperanto movement?
To explain the difficult position of Esperanto on the battlefield
of ideologies and power interests, I have tried to clarify the political
development of the countries in question, particularly Tsarist Russia,
Germany, the Balkan countries, China and Japan, and the Soviet Union.
I hope that in this way I can shed some light on the history of the
decades since 1887—from a different perspective. My basic intention
has been precisely that: to show how much suspicion, hatred and resis-
tance has been generated by an effort to establish non-discriminatory
interpersonal communication—an effort which was often identified with
specific groups (Jews, communists, petty bourgeois) but in fact repre-
sents a self- sufficient integrative internationalism and, as such, refuses
to conform to the usual categories. Thus the history of the persecution
of Esperanto might stimulate conclusions that go beyond the subject of
Esperanto—conclusions that maintain their validity in the present time.
Thus, the revised Esperanto edition2 on which this English transla-
tion is based takes into account numbers of newly discovered docu-
ments, among them materials from the Soviet NKVD to which Russian
researchers had access as of 1990 for a (limited) time. I have also tried
to take into consideration relevant studies that have appeared in various
countries and languages over the past 25 years. At the same time, I have
decided to reduce the length of some chapters, for example in the section
on the Soviet Union, and also discussion of persecutions of Esperantists
aimed primarily at their political activities, for example in parts of Eastern
Europe, and in China and Japan.
My research has benefited greatly from material preserved in the German
Federal Archive in Berlin, including papers newly available f ollowing
German reunification. For several years my work has been assisted by con-
sulting the Hector Hodler Library in Rotterdam, the Planned Language
Collection and Esperanto Museum of the Austrian National Library in
Vienna, and the library of the Japanese Esperanto Institute in Tokyo.
Also extremely helpful has been my easy access to the University Library
2 La danĝera lingvo, Rotterdam: Universala Esperanto-Asocio, 2016.
x Preface
and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation Library, both in Bonn. I remember
with particular thanks the fact that Teo Jung, before his passing in 1986,
presented me with collections of Esperanto p eriodicals from the 1920s
and 1930s and that Kurisu Kei put at my disposal particularly valuable
material on the Soviet and Japanese Esperanto movements. I am grateful
to SAT and Eduard Borsboom who allowed me to consult unpublished
letters to and from Eugène Lanti. In addition to those mentioned, I owe
thanks to many people, among them former Soviet citizens, who provided
me with information and clarifications that helped in the preparation of
the present text. The names of many of these individuals are mentioned
in the footnotes. Finally, I am grateful to all those who helped in the
technical preparation of the book.
I cannot begin to measure the constant support provided by my wife
Akie and from which the present study has greatly benefited. And I
am very grateful to Professor Humphrey Tonkin, who has long taken
an interest in publishing an English version of the book and who has
devoted himself to the task of translating it with unmatchable care and
enthusiasm. My thanks go also to Ulrich Becker, who has hunted down
references to English-language translations of works cited.
October 2015
U.L.
Contents
Part I A Suspicious New Language 1
1 The Emergence of Esperanto 3
2 War and Its Aftermath 35
Part II ‘Language of Jews and Communists’ 85
3 The Rise of a New Enemy 87
4 ‘An Ally of World Jewry’ 109
Part III ‘Language of Petty Bourgeois and Cosmopolitans’ 157
5 Finding a Place for Esperanto in the Soviet Union 159
xi
