This volume explores the relationship between language and political power in the Age of Extremes. Topics include leadership cults under Stalin and Mussolini, depictions of enemies, secret diary-writing under Nazism, and the defence strategies of Soviet party members and Gestapo prisoners.

PART I. INTRODUCTION ; 1. New Perspectives on the Study of Language and Power in the Short Twentieth Century ; 2. Politics as Linguistic Performance: Function and 'Magic' of Communicative Practices ; PART II. THE RISE OF THE DICTATORS AND THE SEMANTICS OF LEADERSHIP ; 3. Fascistese: The Religious Dimensions of Political Language in Fascist Italy ; 4. Visualizing Political Language in the Stalin Cult: The Georgian Art Exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery ; PART III. MIND YOUR WORDS! POLICING LINGUISTIC BOUNDARIES (1920S-40S) ; 5. Revolutionary Selves: The Russian Intelligentsia from Old to New ; 6. Faced with Death: Gestapo Interrogations and Clemency Pleas in High Treason Trials by the National Socialist Volksgerichtshof ; 7. Policing Tonal Boundaries: Constructing the Nazi/German Enemy on the Wartime BBC ; 8. Keep Quiet ... But Tell!! Political Language and the 'Alert Citizen' in Second World War America ; 9. Telling the Truth: Counter-Discourses in Diaries under Totalitarian Regimes (Nazi Germany and Early GDR) ; PART IV. THE GROWTH OF LINGUISTIC AWARENESS IN THE COLD WAR ERA ; 10. The Unknown and the Familiar Enemy: The Semantics of Anti-Communism in the USA and Germany, 1945-75 ; 11. Semantic Strategies of Inclusion and Exclusion in the German Democratic Republic (1949-89) ; 12. War over Words: The Search for a Public Language in West Germany ; 13. The Return of Language: Radicalism and the British Historians 1960-90 ; 14. Suppression of the Nazi Past, Coded Languages, and Discourse of Silence: Applying the Discourse-Historical Approach to Post-War Anti-Semitism in Austria