Until the gassing
The colloquial expression " up to the gassing " is supposed to express that one is "so tired of something that one would rather let himself be killed by poison gas ". It appeared shortly after the First World War and was initially used primarily by soldiers, schoolchildren and students.
With regard to the Holocaust , the use of the idiom is taboo for some people today . However, it is used anyway. A neutral substitute for this in today's colloquial language are the idioms until you dismiss it or until the doctor comes .
Origin and conceptual history
Originally, the phrase refers to the physical concept of gasifying and describes the transition of a substance from a liquid into a volatile aggregate state on heating.
After poison gas was used by both sides in the gas war during the First World War , especially on the western front , the phrase is said to have been used for the first time by German soldiers . Expressed in the language of the soldiers , you stayed at your post “until you were gassed”. In printed form, the saying was used on sarcastic field postcards, among other things .
On the occasion of a criticism of Heinz Küpper's dictionary of German colloquial language, Volume II , the writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger stated in 1963:
“Twenty years after Auschwitz , the saying can be heard in every suburban train in the country : up to the gassing. […] With these findings in mind, the “cultural bearers” of the country will repeat their old whining about nihilism , decree a knife-edge Occident and confidently return to their Goethe years and Hofmannsthal weeks. But Goethe no longer helps, and neither does Hofmannsthal. "
The linguist Peter von Polenz opposed this claim and, in a lecture at the Institute for German Language in 1968, took the view that National Socialism had had no impact on modern language usage . Von Polenz called Enzensberger's methods “amateurish” and proved that the phrase was used in German before the genocide of the Jews. On the occasion of an interview with the German scholar Hans Jürgen Heringer in 1982, von Polenz reiterated this. Heringer shared his assessment only partially.
“But on the other hand, the memory must also be kept alive in the words. [...] Of course, you can't blame anyone for never getting to know this usage. Then he just doesn't know anything about the story. I think it is worth striving to preserve historical reminiscences and associations. "
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Enzensberger's April reading: Heinz Küpper Dictionary of the German Language II in Der Spiegel 14/1963, accessed on September 15, 2011
- ↑ Heinz Küpper: Dictionary of German colloquial language. 1997, p. 876
- ↑ Ludwig Göhring: Popular idioms and expressions. Munich, 1937
- ↑ a b c Until the gassing , on redensarten-index.de, accessed on August 15, 2011
- ↑ duden.de: "up to the gassing"
- ↑ a b From moral speeches at zeit.de, accessed on August 15, 2011
- ↑ Siegfried Jäger : How the right-wing speak. DISS, 1996, ISBN 3-927388-50-5
- ↑ active word; German Language Creation in Teaching and Life, Volume 21.Pädagogischer Verlag Schwann, 1971
- ↑ a b Hans Jürgen Heringer: The dispute over language criticism ( Memento from September 20, 2011 in the Internet Archive )