[Ads-l] Nazi Wit and Humor

George Thompson george.thompson at NYU.EDU
Sat Jan 2 21:50:26 UTC 2016


I've just finished reading a book about the rise of Hitler.  (I assure you
that this interest has nothing to do with recent developments in American
politics.  Surely one or two of you will believe this.)
Anyway, I know nothing about the author, but he seems to be a scholar and
certainly reads German, but there is not a word of German quoted in the
book.  He writes on p. 120:
Most of the Strasser people were, in fact, anti-Semitic socialists -- what
the SA men would call "Beefsteak Nazis": brown on the outside and red on
the inside.
This expression, if indeed used by Nazis in the mid-1920s, as chronology of
the book suggests, anticipates the American disparaging expression "Oreo"
by about 45 years, per HDAS, which dates Oreo to 1969.
The author does not give the German version.

The book is Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., *Why Hitler? The Genesis of the Nazi
Reich*, Westport, Conn & London: PRaeger, 1996.

GAT


-- 
George A. Thompson
The Guy Who Still Looks Stuff Up in Books.
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
Univ. Pr., 1998..

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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