'E i n e Verantwortung, e i n Dienst, e i n e Gefolgschaft' – Kritische Reflexion zu Sprache und Ideologie in Schriften des protestantischen Theologen E. Hirsch

The article presents a critical review of some linguistic methods used by protestant theologian Emanuel Hirsch in an essay published in 1934. In order to justify loyalty of protestant theological science and protestant church to the National Socialist government, Hirsch creates a kind of hybrid idiom that oscillates between the language of political ideology and that of theological science or religious propagation. Some key words such as Volk (people/ nation), Art (kind/ species), Blut (blood) or Ehre (honour) have been selected and analyzed to demonstrate Hirsch’s subtle linguistic and stylistic skill that enables him to mingle unobtrusively political and theological concepts. Hirsch’s conclusion is that loyalty to God has to be equated with loyalty to the national socialist politics. It can be shown that he bases his claims not on scientific argumentation but on a deliberate lack of conceptual clarity. At the end of the article there is a critical comment on some recent German theologians that extol the new edited works of Hirsch to researchers and students, implying that the scientific contents can be clearly separated from linguistic and stylistic affinities to ideologically engaged language.