The article carried with it the assumption that it expressed if not the official point of view of the Sprachverein at least the opinion of the major- ity of its members. On the other hand the president of the Sprachverein, Richard Jahnke, was himself an adept of Esperanto and distanced him- self from the anti-Esperanto statements of Muttersprache.[274] Contributing to defusing the debate over foreign words was the Germanist Theodor Steche, whose scientific study of the subject[275] also included a plea for Esperanto. It was due in no small measure to the Esperanto-sympathizing members of the Sprachverein that the militant chauvinist side of the orga- nization lost its hold in the 1920s and the prejudice against Esperanto moderated.
However, the Esperantists were aware that within the Sprachverein there were also members who, simply because of their ideology, had no desire for communication among peoples. Such individuals could not be convinced by rational argument because they abominated everything 'smelling of internationalism'.[276] A widely circulating book on linguistics expressed the opinion that Esperanto would have a chance only if there were a move toward cosmopolitanism, to a general world culture; the author conceived of such a move in the following terms:
Only if the requirements of international socialism or communism were fulfilled or realized on a worldwide scale—requirements that would lead us directly to soulless equality, to a coldly rational politics of utility, to the erasure of human diversity, to the conquest of everything spiritually elevat- ing, to the elimination of nationhood, to denial of genius and talent—only
then would there be a hope of the general dissemination of this dehuman- izing, rationalizing and colorless international world language.[277]
This opinion, picked up by several German newspapers, undoubt- edly reflected the cultural pessimism current in middle-class circles. Accordingly, only as long as nationalist tendencies had not achieved dominance in such circles could the efforts to win people to Esperanto have any promise of success.
Up to the end of the 1920s GEA maintained a relatively stable posi- tion. In fact it seemed downright strong if we take into consideration the extent to which the enemies of Esperanto complained about the dis- proportionate importance Germans gave to such a language—instead of supporting efforts for the dissemination of German abroad. Franz Thierfelder, for ten years (until 1937) general secretary of the German Academy of Munich, an institution dedicated to 'the scholarly study and cultivation of German identity', steadily asserted that in Germany there were more organized Esperantists than in all other countries combined.[278]After the Nazi seizure of power he reflected on the time when, years ear- lier, he had protested against the use of public resources for Esperanto: the 'internationally inclined' press had jumped on this troublemaker, he said, and refused him access to their columns.1[279] Thierfelder, it should be added, belonged to the more respectable opponents of Esperanto in Germany. He did not hesitate to concede that the 'conquering advance' of Esperanto came about 'not only thanks to extremely skillful recruitment, but also because of its clever and practical internal structure'.[280] Instead of appealing—like the more primitive nationalists—to vague feelings in his attack on Esperanto, he explained quite clearly why he disapproved of the public advance of the language—namely that it endangered the worldwide importance of the German language.
Thierfelder's line of argument makes clear that Esperanto in the Weimar Republic was no longer something to be neglected; GEA was beginning to develop into an interest group recognized as such by its seri- ous opponents. Although GEA, given its neutrality, explicitly supported none of the internationalist movements, it undoubtedly profited from the popularity enjoyed for example by the Pan-European idea among the more progressive parts of the German middle class, so that Thierfelder in 1933 was not wrong in seeing the earlier rise of the Esperanto movement in Germany as characteristic of 'the spirit of the post-war period'.[281]
Hitler on Universal Language
Yet the nationalists never disappeared. Consumed by missionary fer- vor, and seeking to ignite what was in their opinion a lack of national pride on the part of the German people, they considered preoccupation with Esperanto a sign of insufficient patriotism. And among them there emerged, at first barely noticed, a new kind of enemies of Esperanto: the National Socialists. While not entirely different from those militant chauvinists who attacked Esperanto in the years before the First World War, they displayed, ever more clearly as the years advanced, an uncom- promising hostility to the language and the ideas correctly or incorrectly imputed to it.
The departure point for this basic hostility was Esperanto's 'Jewish ori- gin'. As early as 1923, following agitation in the National Socialist meet- ings and newspapers in Bavaria, particularly northern Bavaria, where the infamous anti-Semite Julius Streicher was particularly active, the bulletin boards of Esperantists were stolen; and during the World Congress in Nuremberg Nazi sympathizers 'cut down the big green flag in front of the congress building'.[282] Shortly after these incidents became known, the editor-in-chief of Germana Esperantisto was obliged to repel the attacks of an old opponent, Albert Zimmermann, who declared the battle against 'the Jewish Esperanto' one of his missions in life.[283] Early in 1926 a news- paper on the extreme right described Esperanto as 'a danger to, in fact a mortal enemy of, all forms of volkisch development' and described the movement as led by Jews and their lackeys.[284]
At first the Esperantists tended to turn away from such attacks in dis- gust, based as they were on racial hatred.[285] But, as the final years of the 1920s approached, they were forced to note the degree to which the Nazi attacks went beyond the framework of traditional anti-Jewish prejudice against Esperanto. On 21 January 1928, a debate in the budget commit- tee of the Bavarian parliament gave striking testimony to the dividing line between merely reactionary and entirely fascist arguments con- cerning Esperanto. On the agenda was a petition from the Esperanto groups in Munich and Nuremberg to introduce the elective teaching of Esperanto in middle schools. The only positive interventions came from the Social Democratic[286] and Communist deputies. As was to be expected, the representative of the German National People's Party Hermann Bauer was entirely opposed, calling Esperanto 'a purely mechanistic, soulless creation', a mere code; two years earlier, in a parliamentary intervention, he had referred to Esperanto as the 'un-language' and compared the level of Esperanto congresses to that of striptease shows.[287] But the leader of the National Socialist faction Rudolf Buttmann far exceeded him in the sharpness of his comments. For him, Esperanto was something stitched together by a Jew—a member of a race known for its lack of creative ability and its hostility to German culture; it would undermine German influence in smaller countries and was 'the forerunner of Latinization'.[288]