At the beginning of the 1930s, then, internal problems were shaking the neutral movement—while externally the situation of Esperanto was worsening in numbers of countries. The language was still not faced with widespread persecution: pointing to the principle of neutrality or declar- ing their loyalty to the government, the leaders of the neutral movement trusted that the unfavorable atmosphere would pass, and that in any case the language would not fall victim to political changes. The Esperantist workers felt the same. In October 1932 La Socialisto, in Austria, expressed its conviction that, despite the ban on workers' Esperanto groups, there was no need to fear that the language itself was in danger: 'It would be inaccurate to conclude from [the ban] that fascist and semi-fascist gov- ernments want to suppress Esperanto. Nothing like this has happened so far. Such actions are aimed not at "Esperanto" organizations per se, but at the political tendencies of the organization concerned.'[256]
A few short months after the expression of such optimism, a regime was established in the center of Europe that would render this statement fundamentally inaccurate.
Part II
'Language of Jews and Communists'
3
The Rise of a New Enemy
Esperanto in the Weimar Republic
During the 1920s Germany held what was in many respects an envi- able position in the international Esperanto movement. After the First World War and the creation of the Weimar Republic, the idea of an inter- national neutral language was successful in attracting more and more adherents among Germans. The collapse of German military ambitions strengthened, particularly among the workers, a desire to overcome the barriers of self-isolation and great-power arrogance. Through Esperanto, Germans sought to bridge the gap in interpersonal contacts with a world skeptical of Germany's young democracy. In 1923, under the honorary patronage of Reichsprasident Friedrich Ebert, the 15th World Congress of Esperanto took place in Nuremberg, with almost 5000 attendees. The authorities were generous with their moral, and in some cases finan- cial, support, recognizing that Esperanto was 'an important means' to achieve 'ethical education in the spirit of popular reconciliation'.[257] The well-known publishers Ferdinand Hirt, in Leipzig, and Rudolf Mosse, in Berlin, released new publications in and on Esperanto. From Germany the message of the popular weekly newspaper Heroldo de Esperanto rang out across the world. Statistics for the year 1926 reveal that 30,868 Germans called themselves Esperantists, of whom 8490 were organized into local groups.[258]
The surge of Esperanto in interwar Germany, however, did not pri- marily benefit the neutral movement, as the membership figures for the German Esperanto Association (GEA) show: from 1921 to 1924 the asso- ciations membership actually declined from around 3000 to 2648, drop- ping by the end of 1930 to a mere 2371. At the same time, the German Workers' Esperanto Association (GLEA), operating independently of GEA, prospered, organizing courses for several thousand participants; its membership rose from 2900 in 1924 to some 4000 in 1930.[259]
The two associations' unequal organizational development was partly clarified by Albert Steche, GEA's president, in a review of the situa- tion of Esperanto in Germany at the end of 1923: 'The movement is hindered by political and economic decline. It is kept afloat essentially by the middle-class and working-class elements of the population. The upper classes, science, industry, commerce, and transportation still essen- tially maintain an attitude of rejection, or, at a minimum, indifference.'[260]Steche characterized the situation in precisely the same words in the fol- lowing two years,[261] while for 1926 he noted something of an improve- ment in the situation.[262] From then on, GEA's annual reports registered a steady increase in public favorability toward Esperanto in Germany[263]— an increase apparently unhindered by the economic crisis.[264] Nevertheless, GEA was unable to increase the number of its members.
The German division along class lines was therefore strongly evident in the organized Esperanto movement as well. In 1924 Steche realisti- cally pointed to an ideological chasm 'currently not even bridgeable by Esperanto' between members of the middle class who 'most often con- sider Esperanto simply a Jewish invention, serving anti-German interna- tionalism and pacifism and barring the way to the profit that might be derived from knowledge of foreign national languages', and working-class members, who were focused on the goal of using Esperanto to hasten the arrival of socialism.[265] Steche concluded that, given these circumstances, GEA had to remain a neutral language association where there was room for all German Esperantists 'with primarily patriotic feelings'. He rejected a proposal to transform GEA into a 'militant patriot brigade' because such an approach 'completely denies the basic idea' of Esperanto and 'would drive out the best middle-class representatives'.[266]
Throughout the 1920s GEA followed this strictly neutral line; indeed it seemed the only way to prevent an influential element of public opin- ion, observing the rapid spread of Esperanto among the working classes, from definitively identifying the language movement with political goals. Thus, the Association hoped that it would succeed little by little, through rational argument, not only in convincing middle-class Germans of the practical usefulness of Esperanto but also in blunting the resistance of the strongest opponents of the whole idea of an international auxiliary language.
It was a difficult task. As Eugen Wuster wrote in 1931, in no other country 'the opposition [to a planned language] was as strong as in Germany; until 1929 not a single sympathizer could be found among specialists in linguistics'.[267] A stronghold of opposition, for example, par- ticularly up to the end of the First World War, was the pure-language movement represented by the Allgemeiner Deutscher Sprachverein (General German Language Union). This association not only advocated the correct use of the German language but also tended to denounce users of foreign words as committing intellectual treason against the German people. Because the purists often worked into their attacks the occasional sideswipe at Esperanto as a further danger to the purity of the German language,[268] GEA members devoted considerable energy to efforts to win over the sympathy of the Sprachverein. They argued that learning Esperanto helped sharpen understanding and proper use of the mother tongue[269] and that Esperanto 'prevents the exhaustion and disinte- gration of the national languages and guarantees their free development, removing from them troublesome international terms'.1 4 Esperantists were encouraged to join the Sprachverein, because against it Esperanto hardly seemed capable of success in Germany.[270] In fact, a large number of German Esperantists, including Steche's successor as GEA president, Ernst Kliemke, were enthusiastic members of the Sprachverein.[271]
The point of view of the Sprachverein itself was not unified, indeed conflicted. An unnamed member and a friend of Esperanto asserted in May 1926 that the organization was 'in no sense hostile to our cause', and that in its journal Muttersprache no articles opposed to Esperanto had appeared in a long while.[272] Yet precisely in the same month the journal published an extensive article from the pen of its editor, Oskar Streicher, that was indeed hostile to Esperanto. Although he conceded that within the Sprachverein there were members who knew how to harmonize their enthusiasm for a 'world language' with love of their mother tongue, he criticized the insufficient representation of German-derived words in the Esperanto vocabulary, denied that Esperanto could ever be a living lan- guage, 'because through it there speaks the soul of no people', named the translation of Goethe's Iphigenia into an artificial language 'a sacri- lege against a sacred text' and ended by saying that 'Esperanto would construct a broad bridge over which thousands of destructive foreign words would migrate into German speech, and thousands of German speakers would migrate to what would be for them the ever seductive land of cosmopolitanism'.[273]