Hate speech – From Luther to the present

Hate speech is not as novel as today’s social media users might think. Even in the days of the Reformation in the 16th century, disputes were carried out publicly, in written form – and and often tastelessly. Illustrated broadsheets (or pamphlets) were the medium of choice. In the interview reproduced below, Susanne Reichlin, Chair of Late Medieval and Early Modern German Literature at LMU, talks about how these publications were used and why studying them can give us a better understanding of the present day.

Reformation disputes were one of the issues she addressed in this year’s LMU-Princeton Seminar, which was titled “Dissent and Discord: Practices, Politics, and Poetics.” Reichlin delivered a historical panorama of language as violence, from the early days of vituperative poetry in the ancient Mediterranean world to the present day.

One of your research areas are early modern broadsheets. What role did this medium play in early modern society?

Susanne Reichlin: VMaybe we should begin with the economy. Buying an illustrated broadsheet cost about as much as two mugs of beer or a tradesman’s hourly wage. There were itinerant sellers who carried trays of broadsheets and would “shout out” their contents, as we know from contemporary sources.

The titles – and perhaps also the occasional highlighted verse – would be shouted out loud to attract buyers. This made the broadsheets accessible even to those who could not read. But broadsheets were also sold at fairs, nailed to the doors of churches, hung up at inns and forwarded by post. They served as multipliers, for their content could reach more people than the number of sheets that were printed. And they also reached widely diverse groups of individuals: tradesmen and scholars alike. Their impact was great.

What topics did they cover?

The illustrated broadsheet format – a combination of eye-catching, buzzword-heavy titles, relatively large images and longer portions of text – could be used in many different ways. It lent itself to news and sensational reports, but also to religious exhortations, political information and satire: A battle had been won here, a comet had been seen there, there was a landslide in the mountains, a child with two heads was born there. It was not unusual to interpret sensational news through religious and/or political rhetoric.

It is not always clear today how seriously we should take these interpretations today. Did they really tell of a landslide to move the reader to acknowledge and confess their sins? I’m not convinced that they did. What I do see is that many successful broadsheet addressed a variety of target groups. Recipients with a religious mindset could read them, but so too could people who were interested in current events or political statements. The practice of targeting multiple groups is a technique that we see again and again in the history of popular media. Today, for example, this is done by writings circulated by the alt-right Antaios publishing house, as my colleague Andrea Albrecht – who also spoke at Princeton – demonstrated in a recent publication.

Spiral of escalation

You investigate broadsheets featuring Reformation-era disputes where the visual imagery is horrible. Were there any rules governing what could be said and shown?

There were censorship regulations that also prohibited blasphemy and the vilification of “distinguished individuals”. But it was hard to enforce them, and enforcement usually depended on political interests. That is why, despite the censorship, we have a whole series of broadsheets containing many instances of violence in graphical and verbal form.

How can this violent language be explained?

Looking back through history, this kind of violent pictures and language turn out to stem from a spiral of escalation. Opponents provoke each other: If one party presents an argument that gets under the other’s skin, they would then pay back in equally tastelessly form. Polemic contentions elicit counter-contentions, such that both language and visuals become ever more cruel and violent.

But we also see something else: Many images put horrible scenes on a stage or pedestal. This is an indication that polemic arguments were never targeted solely at a specific opponent. Rather, they always marked an attempt to address the public and win over a wider audience.

This pattern can be traced forward to the present day. To this day, it is worthwhile taking a closer look at hate speech and ask: Is someone trying to take a concrete adversary down a notch and insult them? Or are they not primarily squinting at their audience or the general public, and seeking to persuade or even incite them?

You said that the broadsheets grew ever more polemical because the opposing parties provoked each other. When did this spiral come to an end?

Most Reformation broadsheets were written by theologians, i.e. by scholars. And the dispute between scholars didn’t even end after religious peace was agreed upon [Peace of Westphalia 1648 after the Thirty Years’ War], nor after the Enlightenment. To this day, it remains astonishing how aggressively scholars in the 18th and 19th centuries would fight over what we today would see as minor academic details. They would attack the individual, not their hypotheses. That is something we can also observe in 20th-century academia.

Luther’s anti-Jewish formulations

At the LMU-Princeton Summer Seminar, you also delivered a talk in which you explored how polemic debate can serve to create community. What does that mean?

During the seminar, we read a text by sociologist Georg Simmel, who notes that disputes and disunity are negative for the individuals involved, but that they do indeed exhibit many productive aspects for society as a whole. Simmel points to competition in the scientific arena, where dissent between two academics can yield fresh insights from which everyone ultimately benefits.

In our seminar, we sought to map this approach onto different kinds of historical materials. Rather than assuming the perspective of those polemically insulting each other, we attempted to see their dissent from a higher vantage point: Was there any sign that dissent led to insights from which both sides subsequently benefited? Or – to stick with Reformation-era disputes – did forms and formats of public discourse develop there, that persisted beyond the specific cause of the dispute? Did the reciprocal questioning of religious practices and religious ‘truths’ perhaps also led to new forms of justification for religious worship?

Another striking aspect of Reformation disputes was the similarity between the ways in which both sides operated. Not only did they employ the same rhetorical and figurative strategies, but they also presented very similar arguments. When it comes to violent language or imagery, both sides picked up on formulations that we know from anti-Jewish debate. In the course of disputes, we thus definitely encounter common ground that created a subconscious link between both parties. Unlike in Simmel’s decidedly positive examples, however, we see here manifestations of community foundation that can barely be distinguished from the history of violence against third parties and against Jews.

In current debates on hate speech, there are concerns that the harshening of language my escalate into physical violence. How was this perceived in the past?

Depictions of physical violence such as the dismemberment of Luther’s body (see figure) are treated in the texts as allegories for the dismantling of his teachings, as dissent among his followers. Prima facie, the broadsheet thus gives the impression that the violent language and visuals are not to be taken literally. Rather, they are merely figures of speech. That is misleading, however: We wouldn’t have so many images and texts filled with violence if it was only about the allegorical aspect. These words and pictures provoked emotions, fueled aggression and so on. Here again, we find the strategy of addressing multiple target groups that we saw earlier. Indeed, some recipients might have understood a broadsheet allegorically. But others would have read it as a depiction of violence that legitimated violence, or that at least provoked violent counter-reactions. If you then remember that anti-Jewish visual symbols are used here, it becomes clear that there is a correlation between the violence depicted in the broadsheets and physical violence, even though the link cannot be understood as a straightforward causal relationship.

Do any aspects of this dispute remain today?

They certainly do. Research into hate speech on Twitter, now known as X, proves that Luther’s anti-Jewish formulations are still in use today and are reused in updated forms.

You mean without citing sources?

That’s right. No sources, and adapted to changes in language, but still much more precise than mere stereotypes or sayings that have been in circulation for centuries. That said, it is not clear whether those who use them are aware of the historical significance of what they are saying. Because today large bodies of texts can be searched and researched digitally, it becomes apparent how unoriginal current forms of hate speech are, and that they often have a long history.

Does your research show a need for rules about what can be said and shown?

Taking Reformation-era disputes as my starting point, I would say we need regulated procedures rather than concrete rules. These procedures should prevent adversaries from provoking each other. Thereby we could shift the boundaries of what can be said in the direction of injurious language.

At the seminar in Princeton, we looked at the American context – especially the question of how to deal with dissent on campus. On one hand, the impression was that our societies have forgotten the art of dealing with disagreement in a civilized and productive manner. Societal dissent escalates very quickly: The debates become emotional and polemic – to some extent because “polarization entrepreneurs” (as sociologist Steffen Mau calls them) deliberately stoke the fire.

On the other hand, my American colleagues in particular – who by no means agreed about the campus protests and for whom these discussions were more strenuous because their universities were affected – also showed me what regulated and productive dealing with dissent can look like. For example, they always stressed very precisely the perspective from which they were talking and the experience on which this perspective was based.

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Professor Susanne Reichlin is the Chair of Late Medieval and Early Modern German Literature at LMU. Her research focuses on textual theory, and media such as broadsheets in the 16th and 17th centuries.

More about Professor Susanne Reichlin’s research:
Chair of Late Medieval and Early Modern German Literature, majoring in text theory

LMU-Princeton Summer Seminar: Dissent and Discord: Practices, Politics, and Poetics