Hitler's Table Talk

652 PROBLEMS OF LINGUISTICS
296 2 1st August 1942, evening
Necessity and the taking of decisions—Patois and High
German—German replaces Latin as official language—
Our shorthand-typists.
If one enters a military operation with the mental reservation :
"Caution! this may fail," then you may be quite certain that it
will fail. To force a decision one must enter a battle with a conviction
of victory and the determination to achieve it, regardless
of the hazards. Just imagine what would have happened if
we had undertaken the Crete operations with the idea: "We'll
have a crack at it; if it succeeds, so much the better; if it fails, we
must pull out!"
A compatriot of mine, Stelzhammer, has written some wonderful
poetry, but unfortunately in dialect; otherwise he would
have become the literary counterpart of Bruckner. If his contemporary,
Adalbert Stifter, had written in dialect, he, too,
would not have had more than ten thousand readers. What a
great loss this represents !
In the same way I always think it is a great pity when a really
first-class comedian is dependent solely on dialect for his
humour; he does so limit his audience thereby. Valentin, for
example, can only be really appreciated in Upper Bavaria; even
in the rest of Bavaria itself, half his wit goes begging, and in
Berlin, if he appeared there, he would be a complete failure.
If only he had trained himself to play in High German as well, he
would have been famous everywhere, long before the arrival
of the great American comedians.
There is a more serious aspect to all this., A foreigner spends
two or three years learning German, and then he comes to
Munich. The first thing that greets him is a torrent of unintelligible
dialect; for the moment the good burgher of Munich
realises that he is dealing with a foreigner, he avoids High
German like the plague. "This fellow," he says to himself, "may
be a Prussian—I'll give him what for!" And he persists with
the purest dialect he can produce until his wretched victim is
completely perplexed and driven from the field. I do my utmost
to bring good German to the ears of Danes, Swedes and Finns,
and the radio blares forth dialect! I do away with the Gothic