Asphalt (political buzzword)
The word asphalt and its compounds are National Socialist political catchphrases (“battle terms”) which defame the supposedly “intellectual, Jewish-democratic” civilization of the Weimar Republic and the “rootlessness of the city dwellers caused by it”.
Victor Klemperer locates the first metaphorical use of the word in naturalistic poetry around 1890. Asphalt is the artificial ceiling that separates the city dweller from the natural ground. Back then, an "asphalt flower" meant a Berlin whore, a "more or less tragic personality."
Word combinations
As asphalt literature defined Meyers Lexicon 1936 "designation for works rootless urban literati, before 1933 fashion and decay phenomenon of alien part origin."
Asphalt culture is defined in the spelling of 1941 as "the so-called culture of the post-war period" (the First World War).
Joseph Goebbels spoke contemptuously in his speeches of asphalt intellectualism and the “urbanized asphalt man ”. Terms such as asphalt press and asphalt democracy have a negative connotation .
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d Cornelia Schmitz-Berning: Vocabulary of National Socialism. 2nd edition Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-11-019549-1 , pp. 71-73.
- ^ Victor Klemperer: LTI - notebook of a philologist . Reclam publishing house Leipzig. 21st edition 2005, ISBN 978-3-379-00125-0 , p. 308.