the-language-of-peace

L. L. Zamenhof was a Jewish eye doctor from Białystok, a town where four languages met and the meeting was not friendly, and he concluded as a boy that the hatred was downstream of the incomprehension. His answer, published on 26 July 1887, was a language deliberately owned by nobody: regular, learnable in months, intended not to replace anyone’s mother tongue but to sit beside it as a neutral second. He published under the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto — one who hopes — and the movement kept the name.

Both of the twentieth century’s totalitarianisms read the design and drew the same conclusion from opposite premises. Hitler, in Mein Kampf, presented Esperanto as the administrative language of a coming Jewish world government; under the Reich, orders went out specifically for Zamenhof’s descendants, and all three of his children — Adam, Zofia, and Lidia — were murdered. In the Soviet Union, where Esperanto had briefly been encouraged as the tongue of world revolution, the correspondence networks that made it useful were reread as tradecraft, its speakers designated an international espionage organization and swept into the Great Purge. A regime organized around blood and a regime organized around borders agreed on very little and agreed on this.

The care this entry requires is the distinction between tragedy and irony, because the deaths are atrocity and atrocity is not a genre. The irony is structural and it is in the design: Zamenhof’s language worked by making its speakers legible to strangers and unplaceable by nation, and that is precisely the property that both regimes could only read as conspiracy. A state whose logic is that people belong to peoples has no available category for a voluntary international, so it supplies one — the spy, the cosmopolitan, the rootless — and files the hopeful under it. The instrument of universal understanding was understood perfectly. That was the problem.

Threads

• Forms: Situational Irony · Historical Irony
• Rhymes with: Nobel’s Obituary (the invention its maker meant kindly, read back to him), Curie’s Notebooks