The Rotwelsch Inheritance: Biography of a Secret Language

At the Academy, Puchner will write a history of Rotwelsch, a thieves’ argot spoken in Central Europe from the late Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Rotwelsch flourished during periods of unrest such as the Thirty Years’ War, and was later established as the language of the underground in Berlin, Munich, Vienna, and Prague. Now largely forgotten, Rotwelsch was based on German syntax but relied on Yiddish and Hebrew terms, whose meanings were distorted to make them incomprehensible. As Rotwelsch waned, it became of heightened interest to linguists and philosophers of language (Leibniz) as well as to writers such as Franz Kafka, who admired it as an extreme verison of Yiddish, a language perpetually on the move, potentially subversive, and thus an ideal vehicle of modernism. “Rotwelsch represents […] five hundred years of underground life located at the intersection of vagrancy and the state,” Puchner writes, “an artificial language that became a lived reality for many people.” Puchner’s family history is entwined with Rotwelsch. In the 1970s, his uncle embarked on a mission to translate literary works into Rotwelsch; he bequeathed his archive to Puchner. Then, as a student in the 1990s, Puchner discovered, in the stacks of Harvard’s Widener Library, that his uncle’s father had been one of the Nazi historians railing against Rotwelsch. Though Puchner is unsure if his uncle knew of his father’s hatred, he does know “that this language, so strangely connected to my family, is somehow my inheritance.”