A totenkopf is by itself not a nazi symbol. It is the specific skull. And that specific skull is up there with the crossed stick grenades in terms of messaging.
He didn’t get this by accident.
I will say, I don’t know how one can be into ww2 history without learning of SS symbols. They love to slap that shit in documentaries because we all have to propagate the weird idea that the SS were somehow cool.
When English speakers say “totenkopf,” they 100% mean the Nazi one, just like they don’t generically mean “empire” when they say “Reich” or “leader” when they say “Fuhrer”.
All part of a larger scheme to make it all feel foreign, like the US didn’t inspire any of it. ‘apartheid’ is another one of those. Just translating it to separation would’ve made it feel too close to home
I agree with you about “apartheid,” but often foreign words are used because there’s some more specific context in which they are being used that happens to be in another language and so just keeping it in that language is more convenient, as we also did with “Soviet” or “Glasnost” (and note that the latter was regarded well by American media, so it wasn’t used for villifying it). So when people say “Reich,” it’s not “empire” with spooky music because it’s German (though you can analyze it on that level if you want), it’s because Hitler built up a cosmology around the term with his mythology about the previous two “Reichs” and the “Thousand Year Reich” that was supposedly being born.
This is also used all the time in philosophy and other literary and artistic traditions for the same time. The most infamous example is probably “Dasein,” which is literally just “being” but Heidegger was using the word to talk about a concept that I don’t faintly understand and most others don’t either, so we may as well just call it “Dasein” to note when we are talking about his concept to make things easier to follow. “Umwelt,” more literally just “environment,” refers to the environment as perceived by the subject in the sense of what the subject finds significant and how. For example, a picture on a wall is probably not going to be regarded almost at all by a dog unless they have some unusual conditioning affecting that, but people will regard pictures with more significance. Likewise, there are many noises that people will completely ignore and forget they heard moments after hearing it, but a dog will care a lot about some of those noises. Speaking of the dog’s “environment” or even its “perceptual environment” is less clear than talking about the dog’s “Umwelt,” at least if you know the word in an academic context.
Edit: I distracted myself, but also we in English also use a more literal translation of totenkopf, “Death’s Head,” to refer to the Nazi symbol and especially to the SS unit most associated with it, but barely ever use it to mean “skull-and-crossbones,” preferring either that term or “Jolly Roger” when used in reference to pirates. I really don’t think this is a case of abusing language.
For Totenkopf I was kind of joking, that is a very specific symbol.
But for the others I have a hard disagree. There is nothing general except collection of the specifics. Every empire is unique, the German one being different from every other one exactly as each specific is unique. And every empire made up glory stories about itself. The use of “Soviet” instead of “council”. Every Council has unique aspects, and the choice of whether to translate the word or not is entirely removed from the distance from other “councils” that fit within the generic term. It’s a political choice with the intention of creating distinction as opposed to familiarity. Dasein was explicitly described by Heidegger as different from the word itself, so this doesn’t fit the others.
As Hegel would’ve said, there is no Universal aside from the collection of the particulars. Removing particulars changes the universal, and that is what is actively done in these processes.
Edit: I wanna be clear that I’m not upset or angry in any way, I like this topic and am glad to engage you in it! And would like to hear your position. If any of this comes off as mean instead of just strongly-opinionated, that’s my English fucking up
Like i dont want to dunk on kid you here, but i don’t think I’ve ever seen a documentary or read anything with pictures about the nazis without an ss uniform being presented.
Obviously we all have things we just don’t realise until it suddenly clicks. But I just don’t think we can say that not knowing about ss insignia is the default state even of those interested.
I can imagine being a kid and seeing an SS uniform without closeups in a documentary and your brain being like “yeah I got it, buncha military bullshit symbols and a swastika armband” without feeling the need to look closely at the exact military bullshit symbols, because you’d probably subconsciously expect an eagle or a shield or whatever until the first time you see an actual skull. And then that’s the point where you’re like “Haha, what the fuck?”
Obviously we all have obvious things we don’t realise until suddenly we do. See all the “I was today’s years old” posts or similar.
I’m just saying it’s not like they keep these symbols hidden, they put ss symbols right in your face in most ww2 stuff I’ve consumed.
A totenkopf is by itself not a nazi symbol. It is the specific skull. And that specific skull is up there with the crossed stick grenades in terms of messaging.
He didn’t get this by accident.
I will say, I don’t know how one can be into ww2 history without learning of SS symbols. They love to slap that shit in documentaries because we all have to propagate the weird idea that the SS were somehow cool.
When English speakers say “totenkopf,” they 100% mean the Nazi one, just like they don’t generically mean “empire” when they say “Reich” or “leader” when they say “Fuhrer”.
All part of a larger scheme to make it all feel foreign, like the US didn’t inspire any of it. ‘apartheid’ is another one of those. Just translating it to separation would’ve made it feel too close to home
I agree with you about “apartheid,” but often foreign words are used because there’s some more specific context in which they are being used that happens to be in another language and so just keeping it in that language is more convenient, as we also did with “Soviet” or “Glasnost” (and note that the latter was regarded well by American media, so it wasn’t used for villifying it). So when people say “Reich,” it’s not “empire” with spooky music because it’s German (though you can analyze it on that level if you want), it’s because Hitler built up a cosmology around the term with his mythology about the previous two “Reichs” and the “Thousand Year Reich” that was supposedly being born.
This is also used all the time in philosophy and other literary and artistic traditions for the same time. The most infamous example is probably “Dasein,” which is literally just “being” but Heidegger was using the word to talk about a concept that I don’t faintly understand and most others don’t either, so we may as well just call it “Dasein” to note when we are talking about his concept to make things easier to follow. “Umwelt,” more literally just “environment,” refers to the environment as perceived by the subject in the sense of what the subject finds significant and how. For example, a picture on a wall is probably not going to be regarded almost at all by a dog unless they have some unusual conditioning affecting that, but people will regard pictures with more significance. Likewise, there are many noises that people will completely ignore and forget they heard moments after hearing it, but a dog will care a lot about some of those noises. Speaking of the dog’s “environment” or even its “perceptual environment” is less clear than talking about the dog’s “Umwelt,” at least if you know the word in an academic context.
Edit: I distracted myself, but also we in English also use a more literal translation of totenkopf, “Death’s Head,” to refer to the Nazi symbol and especially to the SS unit most associated with it, but barely ever use it to mean “skull-and-crossbones,” preferring either that term or “Jolly Roger” when used in reference to pirates. I really don’t think this is a case of abusing language.
For Totenkopf I was kind of joking, that is a very specific symbol.
But for the others I have a hard disagree. There is nothing general except collection of the specifics. Every empire is unique, the German one being different from every other one exactly as each specific is unique. And every empire made up glory stories about itself. The use of “Soviet” instead of “council”. Every Council has unique aspects, and the choice of whether to translate the word or not is entirely removed from the distance from other “councils” that fit within the generic term. It’s a political choice with the intention of creating distinction as opposed to familiarity. Dasein was explicitly described by Heidegger as different from the word itself, so this doesn’t fit the others.
As Hegel would’ve said, there is no Universal aside from the collection of the particulars. Removing particulars changes the universal, and that is what is actively done in these processes.
Edit: I wanna be clear that I’m not upset or angry in any way, I like this topic and am glad to engage you in it! And would like to hear your position. If any of this comes off as mean instead of just strongly-opinionated, that’s my English fucking up
Maybe for German speakers totenkopf could mean a skull and bones for pirates or poison, but using the word to English speakers is 100% the Nazi one.
idk dude I was like 15 in 9th grade. I have since, obviously, learned a lot more about the subject.
Like i dont want to dunk on kid you here, but i don’t think I’ve ever seen a documentary or read anything with pictures about the nazis without an ss uniform being presented. Obviously we all have things we just don’t realise until it suddenly clicks. But I just don’t think we can say that not knowing about ss insignia is the default state even of those interested.
I can imagine being a kid and seeing an SS uniform without closeups in a documentary and your brain being like “yeah I got it, buncha military bullshit symbols and a swastika armband” without feeling the need to look closely at the exact military bullshit symbols, because you’d probably subconsciously expect an eagle or a shield or whatever until the first time you see an actual skull. And then that’s the point where you’re like “Haha, what the fuck?”
Obviously we all have obvious things we don’t realise until suddenly we do. See all the “I was today’s years old” posts or similar. I’m just saying it’s not like they keep these symbols hidden, they put ss symbols right in your face in most ww2 stuff I’ve consumed.
True, true