Jonah, I’ve often commented on how certain German words got stigmatized — they just did. (For non-Germans, and those who don’t speak the language fluently, I mean.) Occasionally, I’ll be poking around something musical and see the word Arbeiten — “works.” Absurdly or not, I’ll sometimes think of the Auschwitz slogan. Then there are certain commands, or imperatives: “Schnell!” “Raus!” “Achtung!” I’ve simply seen too many war movies (and episodes of Hogan’s Heroes). I’ve told this story before: I was in Vienna once, and there was this Thai-immigrant family. The kids were playing too close to the street, and the mother yelled, “Achtung!” Made me smile. Anyway, German is a glorious language — there is very little under the sun like lieder (Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, etc.). But . . . You mention the progressive set — and something I read yesterday reminded me of how strong they were — many of them were — for eugenics: including mandatory sterilization. Gunnar and Alva Myrdal were such progressives. They wrote a book on population in the 1930s, and it makes for painful reading today. I will quote Walter A. Jackson, in his book Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience:

They opposed any eugenic policy based on class, religion, or race, but argued that modern, industrial society demanded a higher quality of “human material” than life on the farm had required. Accordingly, it was necessary to face the difficult problem of how to “root out all types of physical and mental inferiority within the population, both the mentally retarded and the mentally ill, the genetically defective and persons of bad character.”

That last category — “persons of bad character” — is awfully broad, don’t you think?