In his retirement, Ken Kronenberg is getting unsettled rather than settling down. He’s making it a mission to translate the most toxic German propaganda from the fascist era of eugenics, racism and slaughter as it seeps through U.S. political speech from the right and threatens to swamp democracy.
The message of his papers and talks – that Nazis learned some of their ways from America – leaves people “in shock,” he said during a talk on a Sunday in May in his cozy Mid-Cambridge apartment.
Though Kronenberg, 80, is the epitome of professorial, with a beard, specs and newsboy cap and an office lined with of aged, leather-bound books, his connection with the material is not academic: His parents were forced out of Germany in 1938, then returned in 1951 to seek restitution after World War II. He learned German as a child and got a refresher attending a Swiss school from 1958 to 1965, then let the language fall into disuse as he drifted, dealing with the emotional baggage of his parents’ experience. “I’m a college dropout,” he said. “I took all kinds of jobs. I was a cab driver in Boston for 12 years. I loved it, if the truth be told.” Still, desperate to find his place in the world, he put up a website in early March 1996 – there were only about 300,000 websites in the world at the time, and he maintains his in its original hand-coded HTML form “like an old New England farmhouse” – and tried his hand at translation, starting with medical texts and patents. His initial attempts were terrible, he admits.
Clients since have included presses at Harvard, Yale, Stanford and the University of Chicago, and Kronenberg has served as president of the New England Translators Association. In what he considers to be his retirement, he can focus on work newly important to him, driven by “what I have seen about the ideology of Maga and Trump and Trumpism.”
“Trump in 2015 was already talking about Mexicans poisoning our blood, and not long after that there was an incident at Andrew Station where a couple of guys accosted a fairly dark-skinned guy who happened to be Mexican sleeping on the floor, and they started beating him with a metal pole and put him in the hospital. And when the cops caught them, they said, ’Trump is right. We have to get rid of these Mexicans,’” Kronenberg said. “That’s when I realized, uh oh, this is bad.”
In 2017 Kronenberg led a panel for the translators association on the beginnings of the crisis in immigration. More recently, he presented his paper “Translating the Enemy: What translation of Nazi documents can tell us about today – and about translation” at the group’s 30th annual conference, held April 18 at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. His paper included discussion on how Nazis studied U.S. laws that crushed the rights of Black people, to see what they could use in their efforts to drive Jews out of public life, and partly to use as ammunition when Americans criticized their treatment of the Jews.
This conversation has been edited and condensed, and Kronenberg made adjustments when shown the interview to check for factual and technical accuracy.
What’s the reaction when you talk with people about your findings? What happened when you delivered your paper to fellow translators?
They were shocked. In the questions from people who came up to me afterward, none of them had had any inkling.
The only people who don’t really understand Nazism and fascism are liberals, because they shy away from it. They like to think nice thoughts – and there are people who are not thinking nice thoughts, and people don’t want to deal with it. So the thing I get most often is, “Oh my god, why are you doing this?”
There was an article in The Boston Globe about a man who infiltrates neo-Nazi organizations. He describes how when they recruit people, they want to know how much of this literature they know. Liberals in general don’t really get that these ideas need to be looked at and dissected and seen for the power they have in the present day. That’s what I’m trying to get across.
You translated works by Wolfgang Knorr, a eugenicist and a propagandist who committed suicide at age 29. Tell us about that.
The Nazi use of eugenics is a case in point. Knorr’s work is junk. There’s no real research behind it of any value, nothing that would be recognized today as having any kind of relevance. It is purely ideological.
Nobody really knows why he committed suicide. My fantasy about it is that he found out he was Jewish and had no place to go. But that’s my mischievous fantasy. I got in touch with his grandson, who lives in Greece, through a mutual friend who was in an online trauma healing group with him. The trauma he had experienced was that his father, who could not live up to the Nazi ideal, was considered to be a failure by his mother. This, of course, had an effect on my friend, who is repelled by the ideology, but had never dared to look at his grandfather’s writings. I managed to get them through interlibrary loan from Germany. After we discussed the articles, I decided to translate them. Widener Library has a copy of Knorr’s dissertation. Apparently the law school has an additional two copies.
These ideologies really filter down through generations.
Look, everything has a price. Everything costs. Whatever circumstances you grow up in, there is a price to pay. The question is what do you do with it? I’m still gnawing on that legacy. I look at my own life and the way in which my parents were affected by the murders of their parents. That entire generation was killed. I can certainly see what effect it had on me.
Have you ever seen those postcards of lynchings? There are huge crowds. People brought their kids to these things with a picnic lunch. What happened to the kids who saw these ghastly murders? It has to have had an effect on them to be involved in that kind of violence. I discovered just recently that my own parents had been threatened with lynching in Germany.
You’ve been working with this material for a while. I’m wondering whether that’s also affected you.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Translators have to seat themselves in the mind of the author. You become intensely engaged with these people.
For example, I translated about 450 letters written in the 1880s between Constantinople and Pforzheim, Germany, by a young woman sent by her parents to be an au pair to a banking family. She wrote these letters almost every day. She felt very downtrodden and actually considered suicide, and reading this stuff, my heart went out to her. When I asked the owner of the letters if I could I have a picture of her, the owner wagged her finger at me and said, “Now, Ken, don’t you go falling in love with Marie. She’s been dead for more than 60 years.” She had my number.
There are people who work as online moderators weeding out child pornography in Nigeria day in and day out, and it gets so they’re seeing these images that they can never shake. PTSD is a clinical term for their condition; I’d say they are shell-shocked. A similar thing happens with this Nazi material. There is a kind of an obligation to look seriously at this material, optimize it for an American audience, and you’re constantly up against it. It’s not as bad as child pornography, but it’s bad enough.
How does it manifest for you?
A feeling of heaviness, of heaviness.
It is worse when you engage with modern politics?
We’re a country with 1,000 billionaires, while 40 percent can’t come up with $400 in an emergency. The income inequality is just immense, and the figures used to describe it conceal tremendous stress and trauma. Significant segments of the ruling class have decided that there is no point in trying to furnish a decent life for the population while maintaining their vast wealth and the power that comes with it. They are opting for fascism, pure and simple. They’re opting for what the Germans got. And that’s very heavy making, I can tell you.
Your paper says you translated a book that had not been translated before?
That was Heinrich Krieger’s 1936 Das Rassenrecht in den Vereinigten Staaten (“Race Law in the United States”). In 1933 the Nazi government sent 45 exchange students to the United States, and Krieger studied Supreme Court opinions and wrote an article in 1934 that was discussed at a meeting of jurists tasked with coming up with the Nuremberg Laws. In the American legal system, a judge can make law that is then reviewed by higher courts. In the end the Nazi jurists concluded that “The American system is good enough for us.” The Nuremberg Laws were a complete break from previous German legal practices.
You gave the example of volk and “people” as a distinction to retain in a translated text because the difference in meaning is so significant. Are there other examples?
Yes, I leave the word volk as is, because it took on racial overtones as the Nazis used it. Krieger and the Nazis assumed that the basic population of the United States was Nordic, i.e., white. One phrase kept the United States from becoming an ideal racial state: “All men are created equal.” While we in this country tend to view Jefferson’s formulation as striving toward greater inclusion, the Nazis believed that it prevented real “race consciousness.” Trump and his movement view it similarly. I leave the word untranslated to remind readers of the battle now being waged over the meaning of “the people.”
Another example of a word that that is still hard to use in German is führer, which just means “leader.” But the word has been contaminated by Nazi usage. You know, my father sometimes referred to Black people as “jungle bunnies.” You would think that somebody who had gone through what he went through would not indulge in such vile stuff. At the same time, when our Black cleaning lady’s husband died, my father accompanied her to all the offices to make sure she received every benefit owed a veteran’s widow. Pure paternalism, for sure. But to me, my father’s attitude encapsulates the confusion of the present moment. And now the United States is being drawn backwards into a very dark place.
A lot of these things are appearing again. The voting rights stuff that the Supreme Court is doing, the curtailment of the Black vote, the disenfranchising. It’s essentially creating a new Jim Crow. The denigration of Haitians and Somalis. Anything to foster racial paranoia. That’s really what this is all about.
I’m just curious as to whether the informality of your education ever caused people to second-guess what you do?
You know, nobody has ever asked. Nobody at Harvard University Press ever asked me what my education was. All they were interested in was whether I could do the job. That’s one of the really nice things about the United States. In Germany, I think they might have asked, well, what are your credentials?
“Show us your papers?”
Yeah, show us your papers, yeah.
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