Leo Weisgerber


Johann Leo Weisgerber was a Lorraine-born German linguist who also specialized in Celtic linguistics. He developed the "organicist" or "relativist" theory that different languages produce different experiences. He was the son of a village teacher who served as a young man in the German army in Flanders, so could not return to his home city. During World War II his pan-Celticist ideology was co-opted to support the German war effort, as did pro-Polish and pro-Czech ideology on the side of the allies.

Scholarly career

After studying in Bonn, Weisgerber taught as a professor of general and comparative linguistics at Rostock University, Marburg University and Bonn University. He was an editor of the journal Wörter und Sachen, which he used as a vehicle for his ideas. After the Second World War he taught mainly in Bonn. He wrote prolifically throughout his career. Among other activities he founded the modern German language journal Wirkendes Wort and was a co-founder of the Institut für Deutsche Sprache.

Theory of language

Reacting to older linguists' emphasis on form, Weisgerber initiated what he called inhaltbezogene Grammatik. Starting from the study of translation problems and of colour amnesia, he contributed notably to the theory that language determines and structures our apprehension of reality. This was initially influenced by the structuralist theories of Ferdinand de Saussure, but Weisgerber's theory soon took him far beyond the simple Saussurean linkage of form and content. His other debts were to Wilhelm von Humboldt and Jost Trier.
Weisgerber argued that each language community has its own perception of the world, different from that of other groups:
In this respect, languages imply a "world view" that can produce sustained cultural differences.
Centrally, Weisgerber contended that each language community was engaged in a process of 'wording the world' by means of its mother tongue. Mediating between the forms of a language and the external world, there was a 'linguistic inter-world', which operates directly, indirectly and in part autonomously, in ways peculiar to that language. In acquiring a specific mother tongue, a speaker will also unconsciously acquire and be influenced by its distinctive categorizations and structures. These effects permeate the entire community and shape its perceived world.
From 1925 through into the 1970s, Weisgerber repeatedly cited colour terms in support of his views. Categorisation of colour impressions under a small number of generally applicable terms like blau and rot was, for him, the outcome of long evolutionary development, and only a minority of languages had achieved this. Specifically, he found it remarkable that the German language had mastered the entire world of colour with only eight abstract colour words.
Weisgerber claimed in 1929 to have discovered a significant restructuring in the field of visual impressions. Simplistically, he reported a decline since ancient Germanic times in the verbal expression of colour, with objects nowadays perceived as colour-bearers, not colour-transmitters. Empirical evidence for this has since proved to be contradictory. Better supported, but still in need of verification, was his converse hypothesis of a corresponding historical shift in the expression and perception of Glanz. These non-chromatic light phenomena had earlier been freely rendered adjectivally, but were now mainly expressed in modern German 'Glanzverben' like glänzen and schimmern.
Weisgerber's conception of linguistic relativity was more extreme than that of Benjamin Lee Whorf or Edward Sapir, with whom the theory is most often associated. Resonance in the Anglo-Saxon world was limited partly by Weisgerber's arcane terminology, but more by his French-German ethnic background in an "Americanized scientific community", dominated by structuralist universalists like Noam Chomsky. In Germany he remained a significant figure in German linguistics well into the 1960s, when politically as well as linguistically his views fell into scientific discredit. His theory was then overtaken by new structuralist and universalist approaches from Britain and America, as well as elsewhere in Europe – "history" was out, "structure" was in. One of his pupils, Helmut Gipper, prominently developed his ideas in modified form, in a series of articles and as co-editor of the Duden Grammatik from the late 1950s onwards. Gipper was also influential as co-editor of an extensive bibliography on Sprachinhaltsforschung, as linguistics broadly within the Weisgerber tradition has come to be known.
Weisgerber can be seen as an epigonic scholar of the German idealistic and romantic traditions alike, that insisted on the compatibility of reason and history and did not play off the first contra the latter. That he did not resist narrowing it down to irrational and silly Germanicism/Celtism does not distinguish him from the academic climate of his times.

Pan-Celticism

Before World War II, Weisgerber established links with Celtic nationalists in Ireland, Britain and Brittany, which were seen as a threat to national unity by the respective majority governments. The Breton nationalists joined Germany at the beginning of the war, at least some of them. After the Fall of France, Weisgerber initiated the creation of the and directed the radio station Radio Rennes Bretagne which broadcast the first radio transmissions in the Breton language, something that most Bretons had been waiting for unsuccessfully for decades.
These ventures, which were supported by the Ahnenerbe, were perceived by the French Resistance as German-sponsored propaganda organizations, which they in fact were, promoting the relationship between language and Volk and supporting Breton autonomy from France. This "augmenting – assumed or real – ethnic fractions in enemy states" was a political tactic supported by the German Society for Celtic Studies, under the remit of the Ahnenerbe. This tactic was used by many war-faring states, Weisgerber thus being in a line with Lawrence of Arabia, the Germans supporting Irish independence or the British supporting Polish or Czech independence – it is not genuinely Nazi, nor does it hint at a character/scientific flaw in Weisgerber. The counter-tactic was employed by Americas ally Joseph Stalin, who deported hundreds of thousands of non-Russians, mostly by means of American military logistics. Roosevelt agreed after the war that all ethnic non-Russians that had fled or otherwise collaborated with the Germans be handed over to the Russians, where most were either actively killed or starved to death in work-camps.
After the defeat of the Nazis, Weisgerber assisted the members of the Breton Bezen Perrot SS militia, led by Célestin Lainé, providing them with false papers to allow them to escape to Ireland with the help of other Celticists, a practice that can be seen both critically political and/or humane.

Selected writings