Baiting
Hetze (no plural) stands in the German language for an exaggerated hurry, great haste and being driven. According to the Duden, the totality of unobjective, hateful, slanderous , denigrating statements or actions that generate feelings of hatred, hostile moods and emotions against someone or something is derogatory. In the hunter's language , the term refers to the hunt .
etymology
Derived from the verb hetzen for 'hunt, drive, stir up', mhd. Rush 'hunt, drive', there is a causative education to hate , literally 'to hate, to persecute'. The word for 'drive dogs to hunt, hunt game with dogs', which comes from the hunter's language, was adopted relatively early in general usage in the sense of 'urge to hurry, hurry' and 'stir up, stir up, upset one another with words'. This verb was used to create agitation for 'hunting with dogs, pursuit, haste, restless agitation' in the 16th century, as well as 'inciting hatred , dissatisfaction, and evil propaganda ' in the 19th century. In Upper German Hatze , Hatz was used without umlaut . Hetzer has been used since the 17th century to refer to someone who ' agitates ', which is derived from the ahd. Anahezzāri 'impeller , incitator ' and has been documented since the 12th century. Inciting is used in the sense of ' chasing away, driving to evil, inciting hatred, inciting ', mhd. Inciting for 'persecuting'.
Incitement in the political and social sense
In a social sense, incitement is used to denote unobjective and disparaging statements with the purpose of provoking hatred against people or groups, stirring up fears of them, defaming or demonizing them .
A historically significant example is the baiting of Jews during the National Socialist era , which promoted the gradual exclusion of Jews from social life in Germany with carefully thought-out means of propaganda, e. B. by the newspaper Der Stürmer .
The criminal offense of so-called " boycott agitation" or "subversive agitation" was significant for the political repression apparatus in the GDR . However, it was not only used to combat actual agitation, but also abused for the purpose of suppressing freedom of expression by criminalizing opposing statements of any kind against the politics of the SED dictatorship as "agitation" and punishing them with severe penalties.
