Abbas Khider’s fifth book, Deutsch für alle: Das endgültige Lehrbuch (German for Everyone: The Definitive Manual, 2019), is a slender tome of heavy laughter. Ostensibly motivated by a desire to help foreigners learn the language and natives to bring German among the elegant and accessible languages of the world, Khider echoes Mark Twain’s sentiment that the study of German is “harassing and infuriating.” Surely, the author of Tom Sawyer wrote in A Tramp Abroad (1880), “There is not another language that is so slip-shod and systemless, and so slippery and elusive to the grasp”; when German speakers finish a very long sentence, they themselves must experience a “touching inquisitiveness” as to what they have just said, he told journalists and writers at the Concordia Club in Vienna in 1897.1 Like linguists in pursuit of an ideal language, Twain and Khider streamline sentences, articles, and prepositions, straight-facedly trimming down exceptions that make rules look “as reliable as horoscope charts.” German for Everyone borrows from its predecessor the autobiographical framework of the author as an embattled student, the list of grammatical difficulties and the funny confusions they generate, many of the remedies put forward, the scuttling yet relentlessly funny mischievousness directed at German, and the rhetoric of a drastic reform that will save it from becoming a dead language.In that atmosphere “brimful of political electricity” at the end of 1897, jokes about German struck a sensible chord. Twain likely became increasingly aware of this aspect during the stormy sessions he attended in the Austrian Parliament.2 In “Stirring Times in Austria,” he marveled at the “condition of incurable disunion” among the nineteen nations of the dual monarchy and noted that, although they spoke eleven languages (or “eleven distinct varieties of jealousies, hostilities, and warring interests”), the Germans, numerically “a fourth part of the empire’s population,” insisted that all its business be conducted in their tongue. This discrepancy stymied the formation of a parliamentary coalition, necessary for the renewal of the Ausgleich holding Austria-Hungary together. The German Liberals’ obstruction of Count Kasimir Felix Badeni, who had secured an alliance with the Bohemians (through a language ordinance that gave Czech equal status with German), was the beginning of violent protests that progressively weakened the legitimacy of the Austrian government, eventually leading to the dismantling of the multilingual empire in 1918. Remarkably, at the banquet organized in Twain’s honor by the Viennese Journalists’ and Authors’ Association Concordia, his speech was a version of the published essay “The Awful German Language,” concerned exclusively with linguistic matters. The hosts’ “stormy cheers” recognized the American writer as “the truest friend of the German language.”Khider’s manual evinces an even more intimate sense of connection.3 Readers familiar with his previous four novels—recognized with prestigious literary prizes like the Adelbert von Chamisso, Hilde Domin, Nelly Sachs, and others—will remember some of the anecdotes prefacing grammatical problems in German for Everyone: they document his life as an Iraqi-born asylum seeker, student of philosophy, and German-language writer and here credential him as a language reformer. Ready to put his past as a tramp to rest, he has found the kind of time “only the dead have” to learn German; and then he has found even more time to design Neudeutsch, or New German, a radically simplified language from which subclauses, gendered articles, separable and irregular verbs, noun and adjective declension have been eradicated.4 Neudeutsch boasts the universal article de, symmetrical pronouns, only main clauses and regular verbs, and fewer prepositions. “I want to prevent someone like Mark Twain coming here and uttering sentences about German like the following: ‘The German language should gently and reverentially be relegated among dead languages, since only the dead have time to learn this language.’”5 But for this passing reference to Twain—a quick wink that both identifies the source of inspiration and obfuscates the extent thereof—one could accuse him of plagiarism. Yet what a difference 130 years makes!Like Pierre Ménard, author of Don Quijote, Khider would be the author of a very different text even if he had reproduced Twain’s original word for word. One need only imagine Twain’s joke about his frustrations with the many meanings of the pronoun Sie (she, polite you, they . . . ) coming from someone with Khider’s dark-haired complexion after 9/11: “This explains why, whenever a person says SIE to me, I generally try to kill him, if a stranger” (AGL, 606, 14). Whereas Twain provoked hilarity, the reactions elicited by Khider’s Botschaft were decidedly mixed. While many readers understood the “irony signals” (die Ironiesignale) and appreciated the “very smart slapstick” (ein sehr kluger Klamauk), others, particularly on social media like Facebook and Twitter, reacted with racist insults, hateful comments, and threats, which the cultural broadcaster FAZIT summed up using an English word, with superb, although probably unintended irony: “Shitstorm against Abbas Khider.”6Familiarity with populist discourses on the far right makes it relatively easy to imagine why Neudeutsch might look to certain readers like the stuff of nightmares.7 Clearly this writer has made himself too comfortable in the German language, treating it like his own home, instead of an ancient city with streets and squares sedimented historically.8 A barbarian who never contributed anything to German culture, oblivious to the fact of language as an affordance of sophisticated thought, he nonchalantly transforms a metaphysical privilege into a crude replica.9 This language will supposedly be for everyone, that is, everyone who must learn it as a foreign language, as if anticipating a time when German Europeans will be a negligible minority put in the situation to relearn their own language as if it were a foreign one or, rather, to learn Neudeutsch like strangers in their own land, in order to reintegrate into what used to be their own culture. In short, Deutsch für alle could be a perfect cautionary tale for patrimonial populism.To such readers, Khider’s own disavowal of Neudeutsch as “a serious linguistic aberration” presumably does not change much, and it does not matter that his written German and knowledge of grammar, complete with linguistic jargon, is impeccable. That he never adopts his delightfully symmetrical and user-friendly Neudeutsch (other than to illustrate the new grammatical rules) is also no mitigating factor, and it is irrelevant that Khider has gone so far in his cultural integration efforts as to study philosophy in German, an experience he humorously compares to learning to drive at the Formula One. That was the time when he had to give up both his bilingual dictionaries (Arabic-German, German-Arabic) and the monolingual one, and following his professor’s advice, read secondary literature and philosophical lexicons in order to plumb the depths of Immanuel Kant’s, G. W. F. Hegel’s, and Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. “There is no field in German comparable to philosophy, when it comes to the complexity of thoughts and the claim to linguistic precision” (DfA, 16), muses Khider, echoing luminaries like Theodor W. Adorno and Heidegger.10 One must grant that such high-minded reflections do seem at odds with the idea of a simplified Neudeutsch, a language whose ambitions mostly concern the everyday lives of ordinary citizens like Muhammad, Marina, or Ali. One begins to suspect that the manual’s scene of instruction lies elsewhere and that Khider’s “new German” signals an inadequacy of a different order than linguistic.Indeed, as in Twain’s case, foreignness defamiliarizes the language and breaks its spell of necessity, but whereas the American writer flattered his Viennese audience and the miracle of their agreement in language with his deprecatory jokes, reserving witticisms about their disunion for his political dispatches, Khider nimbly introduces his critical stance through the double entendre of the title (German—the language? the identity?—is currently not for everyone, but his deft pedagogy will make it so) and treads through social landscapes of language that raise an implicit but insistent question: What does it mean to be part of a community of speakers? This echoes Adorno’s dissent over German upon his return from his American exile, which sheds light on a different kind of manual that emerges in the palimpsest of Khider’s grammar book: it imparts political education and a lighthearted proposition about living with others whose German might be differently accented. Making explicit his claim to community, Khider puts forward a simplified morality centered on the integrity of human life.At Café Refugio, where Khider found inspiration for his book, old and new Berliners interact in German.11 For the newcomers, however, “German” is not just the language that resists mastery but also everything they experience in this language, including bureaucratic frustrations, impenetrable politics, and cold weather. As someone who received asylum in 2000, Khider is in a position to note that “nothing has changed in Germany, linguistically and grammatically, over the past twenty years.” I mean, he adds ironically, “not just . . . the tenderness of authorities, the moral intercourse of political parties with all the important aspects of life, the clarity of paragraphs and the friendly faces here during lengthy sunny and cloudless winters, but also the endlessly delightful cases of the German language the students will never be rid of” (DfA, 26–27). Khider’s language reform—a magic-like gesture that ostensibly concerns prepositions and declension but through sympathetic transfer might beneficially influence politics and bureaucracy—dramatizes the challenges of integration in a new country through a relentlessly humorous engagement with its language.The manual is premised on an appeal to the basic facts of grammar that German speakers agree on. “Appealing to criteria,” writes Stanley Cavell in The Claim of Reason, “is an appeal we make when the attunement is threatened or lost . . . when we ‘don’t know our way about,’ when we are lost with respect to our words and to the world they anticipate. Then we start finding ourselves by finding out and declaring the criteria upon which we are in agreement.”12 These criteria are the grammatical rules that Khider illustrates with examples of problems small and big, from sparrows and underpants to mixed families and political parties. The examples are not exclusively German: his manual also concerns itself with European educational reforms (the “Bologna sauce”) that have turned seminar rooms into huge bedrooms (DfA, 53), with torture in American prisons (“Do they use democratically elected torture devices there?” [DfA, 41]), and with ambitious politicians speaking Latin while the “poor people are bawling” (DfA, 82).13 In the spirit of expanding the readers’ sense of the world, Khider also informs them about weather patterns in Iraq (DfA, 78) and throws in some Arabic proverbs for good measure (DfA, 23, 60). These are explorations of the affordances of language: How does it shape a worldview? What does it make possible and what does it obstruct? What kind of community does it accommodate, and what world does it anticipate?A naturalized citizen, Khider brings to the project a double perspective: that of a foreigner aware of cultural stereotypes about Germans, not all of them flattering; and that of an immigrant who has taken extensive notes about language, culture, and customs in his host country. In his experience, “German” is by no means a homogeneous culture: “German federal states are a mosaic of many colors and stones” (DfA, 59). He cites regional differences and dialects, marveling at the nuances of Berlin humor, idiosyncrasies of smoking bars in Bavaria, and the motivations of vigilantes in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (DfA, 58); he even borrows some of his linguistic remedies (the article de, the pronouns mi, di) from regionalisms in Bavaria, a place where he had frequent racist encounters. Khider is openly committed to the view that “a language is a mirror image of our life”: while entertaining readers with grammatical rules and exceptions, he casually points to a window or a door left ajar through which we catch glimpses of ordinary lives.14 The figure of the child playing Robin Hood with his stay-at-home father in a miniature life scene—a fragile and intimate moment, as Cavell might say—is symbolic of Khider’s own use of make-believe to build a world for his readers. His book might parade as a grammar manual, but it reads like a novel indebted to the prose of everyday life.As one learns, apropos relative pronouns, about people like Massud or Ali Baba, one suspects that German for Everyone aims to compel an acknowledgment of “German” as a diverse form of life. Massud—or is it Karim from Khider’s novel Ohrfeige?15—is pursued by police, apparently on account of his name: The police are looking for a man named Massud. He has taken the immigration office by assault and slapped a coworker. Marina opened the door to a policeman. He shows her the photo of the man who has assaulted the authorities. But Marina doesn’t know him.“Your husband’s name is Massud.”“Not everyone named Massud is my husband. My Massud is a German citizen. What should he be doing at the Immigration Office? He and our child are actually abroad right now.” (DfA, 70)Massud has everyday worries like everyone else: Massud is not hungry. He is supposed to call someone, but he can’t remember whom. But that can happen to anyone. (DfA, 73)Yet a few pages later, recapitulating pronouns, we catch a glimpse of him and his wife again, and learn that their lives are not easy: Her name is Marina, she is from Mainz. His name is Massud, he is from the Chad. Their child Friedrich was born in Baden-Württemberg. They all have German citizenship. We call them the “negro family” in our apartment building. On the street, the father is often stopped by policemen for no reason, at the supermarket he is constantly under surveillance by the staff, and he hasn’t gone to a disco-bar in an eternity because he knows that the doorkeepers always send him home. Marina gets very upset and often loses her temper, but Massud is used to it and takes it all lightly, with a friendly smile. Their child Friedrich doesn’t get any of this treatment yet, but he will soon. (DfA, 74)Massud and Marina’s story is not simply a made-up example; Khider positions it against a social script of discrimination and unfairness. In the world that shapes up in his manual, other families are separated, just like separable verbs: he quips that a family where the father is stuck in Munich, the mother in Potsdam, and the child in Bielefeld is “not a family, but a catastrophe” (DfA, 108). Therefore he aligns himself with right-wing conservative parties and, advocating for the family as a unit that must remain together, declares all verbs unseparable (DfA, 109).Khider’s linguistic reform is underwritten by a radical vision of social justice. He abolishes articles and declension because “nothing on this planet is worth declining.” He makes patriarchy a thing of the past (no more ihm, since the masculine er should not inflate itself, in “typically masculine” fashion [DfA, 64]), and anticipates a classless society by getting rid of irregular verbs, because they “seem to believe they are better than everyone else” (DfA, 99). He addresses situations where trivial considerations intervene between the subject and the verb in subclauses: “A sparrow, for example, has two wings. It flies. The sparrow (doer) and the flight (deed) stand next to each other and belong to each other” (DfA, 47). Why do so many things come between the doer and the deed? “In German one waits in a subclause endlessly for the verb, one becomes impatient, powerless, and bored, before it surfaces” (DfA, 47). This little parable illustrates the temporality of bureaucracy and the differed promises of asylum, residence, and citizenship; Khider, self-appointed reformer of German, proclaims the end of subclauses.He appears to borrow one of the guiding principles of the organization Give Something Back to Berlin, namely, that “to become citizens and believe in democracy, people should be treated as citizens from the start.” In his manual he imagines immigrants spontaneously flooding the streets to celebrate the adoption of his universal article de, happy to give free rein to their hatred of the authoritative regime of articles (der, die, das). They would shout, “We are de people!” (Wir sind de Volk!), a reminder of the social contract reaffirmed by the Leipzig protesters in October 1989, which led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, here reclaimed by immigrants to assert the principle of equality as the foundation of a truly democratic community. The challenge is to obtain recognition of this principle from native Germans who might not see it as applying to newcomers: “It’s also funny to imagine the dumbfounded faces of the natives looking at these cheering people, shaking their heads and thinking that all the foreigners and migrants have gone mad” (DfA, 33–34). Ironically, a few months after the publication of German for Everyone, the Far Right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) gained its strongest support in Saxony and other states in former East Germany, having resurrected the 1989 slogan for its political campaign.16This success, and the negative reactions to German for Everyone, belie Khider’s premise of fellowship in German. They also raise the possibility of a lack of agreement about what “German” is.17 What does it mean to make a language one’s own and to formulate a claim to the community of its speakers? Might foreignness be instrumental in the defamiliarization of an experience of language and community one blindly takes for granted?“The person who once claimed that ‘we live not in a country, but in a language’ was right.18 When one lives in a language like in a home, one treats it differently” (DfA, 119), writes Khider, explaining the mindset that governed the design of Neudeutsch. The distinction implied here is between a language that one treats as one’s own and a foreign language in which one does not take belonging or ownership for granted. The spirit of this distinction inflects Adorno’s explanation of why he wanted to return from his American exile to the place where German was spoken. In a foreign language, he muses, one speaks in the mode of an address to others by whom one tries to make oneself understood. By contrast, in one’s native tongue one simply says something as compellingly as possible: the language itself stands in for one’s fellow human beings (WIG, 130). Adorno relies here on “an old, if unestablished feeling, that the mutual meaningfulness of the words of a language must rest upon some kind of connection or compact among its users,” a feeling that makes any act of speaking a claim to community (CR, 22). This reflection belongs to Cavell, who shows in The Claim of Reason that its locus classicus is in discussions of the social contract in John Locke’s, David Hume’s, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s political theory. The question it raises is: How does such a compact bear on individuals who were not present when it was established? What about foreigners like Khider, whose consent, as Locke pointed out, could only be tacit?Cavell’s reflections shed light on Khider’s Lehrbuch as a project of political education. The Claim of Reason examines the criteria on the basis of which speakers of a language say what they say, admitting that “nobody could have established them alone, and that of course whoever is party to them does know what they are (though he or she may not know how to elicit and state them, and not recognize his or her complicity under that description)” (CR, 22). Cavell compares this lack of awareness to the “mode of ignorance” emphasized by Rousseau in the domain of social theory, which led to “the discovery of a new mode of knowledge, a way to use the self as access to the self’s society” (CR, 26). Cavell describes the mechanism of the social contract in terms of a consent to membership in a polis: in addition to recognizing the principle of consent itself (“I recognize others to have consented with me, and hence that I consent to political equality”), the consent implies a recognition of the society and its government as one’s own, which means that one is answerable to it and for it. The effect of the teaching of the social contract is, for Cavell, “to show how deeply I am joined to society and also to put society at a distance from me, so that it appears as an artifact.”Absent the crutch of social theory, the perspective of a foreigner can have the same effect, Khider’s book suggests. Bound to the laws of community not through birth but because his or her “presence implies tacit consent” (as Locke notes in the Second Treatise of Government [quoted in CR, 24]), the foreigner is naturally at a distance from the host society and making conscious efforts to decipher it, as if it were an artifact (which it is). Questions like “How do I know with whom I am in community and to whom and to what I am in fact obedient?” suffuse every interaction, every one of the foreigner’s acts of speaking. It is in this sense that Khider’s project aligns with the philosophical significance of social contract theories in their “imparting of political education”: it sheds light on the contract taken for granted by the community of German speakers, challenging them to recognize that consent to participate in it is premised on the capacity to speak—for oneself and for others, in mutuality. As Cavell puts it, “Once you recognize a community as yours, then it does speak for you until you say it doesn’t, i.e., until you show that you do.”19 In this light, Khider’s Neudeutsch is a form of dissent, which is “not the undoing of consent but a dispute about its content, a dispute within it over whether a present arrangement is faithful to it.”20 Neudeutsch alerts readers that “German” as it stands is not inclusive of all those who have at least tacitly consented to participate in the (political) community of speakers. This has compromised the principle of equality, withholding the right to speak from some of its members.Khider’s project is a distant echo of Adorno’s dissent in “On the Question: ‘What Is German?,’” where he expresses views shaped by his own experience of foreignness.21 Alienation from German during his American exile alerted him to the “naïve relation to what is one’s own,” teaching him the importance of “untiring vigilance regarding any swindle” one’s native tongue might promote. Although Adorno refers to “the metaphysical surplus of the German language” evidenced by the difficulty of translating philosophical texts, his note of caution reinforces his dismissal of Kultur as the obvious answer to the question “What is German?” (WIG, 130). Adorno justifies his dissent on historical grounds: once established as autonomous, a spiritual culture (Geisteskultur) also has the “tendency to detach itself from real humanity and become self-satisfied” (WIG, 126), in an “unrelenting upright lack of consideration for the other” (WIG, 124). Historically inseparable from “the drive toward boundless domination,” it is “no stranger from inhumanity.” Adorno denigrates Richard Wagner’s definition of German, “doing something for its own sake,” as “the famous formulation of German collective narcissism,” revising it as follows: “If one dares assume something that is specifically German, then it is this intertwining of the magnificent—unwilling to hold itself to any conventionally established border—with the monstrous” (WIG, 124).22 Unwavering intellectual radicalism had as its corollary the rise of Adolf Hitler to power in Germany: continuing to cultivate it would mean courting the permanent possibility of relapse (WIG, 125).23 To keep it at bay, Adorno concludes somewhat cryptically, “German” would have to be associated instead with “a transition to humanity.”24 One assumes that this would mean an attunement to the very aspects obliterated in the alienation of Kultur from its content: moral values, reality in its diverse forms of manifestation, and a thoughtful regard for others.It is probably no coincidence that, contemporary with the experience of fascism, a similar turn away from Kultur occurred in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. I have in mind the reformulation of a thought, which in The Brown Book read “To imagine a language is to imagine a culture,” and in the Philosophical Investigations became “To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life” (PI, sec. 19). Juliet Floyd notes that Wittgenstein’s preference for Lebensform over Kultur, consistent since 1936, registered the realization that culture, the realm of rules and social habits described in The Brown Book in the vocabulary of language games, already presupposed complex forms of life that enabled specific ways of structuring meaning.25 Wittgenstein began to see our language, our mutual interactions, and our activities in the world as subject to both cultural and biological necessities.26 Language was not merely a social, conventional, and artificial construction; it also captured “the common behavior of mankind” in its varied interaction to its nonhuman environment (PI, secs. 204–6, 272). The connection with Adorno’s hope in “a transition to humanity” is striking, particularly in its implicit attention to “others.” Significantly, Wittgenstein imagines the elucidation of forms of life through comparisons (Vergleichsobjekte, cf. PI, sec. 130), and in this sense, Floyd insists, a Lebensform is not an item to be described but a method of investigation invested in “reshaping and reconfiguring our sense of possibility, of our dealings with one another, with language and with the world.”27 Imagining things from the perspective of someone “other” involves for Wittgenstein an “anthropological move” that engages our values, interests, and experiences. In attending to “the variety of possible ways of structuring living,” Wittgenstein’s ambition was to avoid a philosophy in which “the problems of life remain completely untouched.”This ambition of relevance on behalf of philosophical thought bears a quiet kinship to Adorno’s awareness of the importance of critical self-reflection, most notably to the “fidelity to the idea that the way things are should not be the way they remain” (WIG, 131)—the impetus behind his redefinition of German as “transition to humanity.” These considerations offer a historical context and a conceptual framework for Khider’s dissent in German for Everyone, at a time when right-wing xenophobia recalls the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s. I read this book as Khider’s own minima moralia, conducted in the spirit of Adorno’s revision of “German.” Echoing Wittgenstein’s Lebensform, Khider’s account is a method of investigation committed to the rough ground of ordinary life, as experienced by immigrants, starting from what we say when.28 And like Adorno’s reflections from damaged life, Khider’s anecdotes are drawn from his and others’ experiences as asylum seekers and immigrants trying to integrate in Germany. Formally, in Khider’s manual the anecdotes illustrate grammatical rules: since this is a German-language manual, they are made to count as “German,” to be part of the Lebensform one imagines when one thinks of the German language. And by referring to instances of discrimination and inequality, or other specific challenges faced by these immigrant characters, he presents readers with the question of whether this present arrangement is faithful to the content of their social contract, based on the principle of equality. This is, in Cavell’s account of the claim to community, what it means to speak publicly: determining whether one is willing to count a feature (an experience, for example, such as that of immigrants like Khider) under a concept (here “German,” but perhaps also “unjust,” “discriminatory”), which is the calling out, or—claim;29 and determining whether one wills to enter one’s accounting into a particular occasion (coming before, pro-, those to whom one speaks, i.e., declaring oneself in “a position to inform or advise or alert someone of something, or explain or identify or remark something to someone”; here Khider or, in an earnest joke, Abbas Müller-Schmidt, interpellating his fellow German speakers into the “we” of community).Some of Cavell’s anecdotes echo Wittgenstein’s obsession with the example of accounting for someone’s pain behavior, which chimes with Adorno’s distanciation from complicity with suffering. Both provide a critical ground for the expression of dissent, a stage on which Khider’s account of the experience of immigrants as something that needn’t remain as it is assumes the symbolic form of an arrogation of voice addressing itself to those with whom he finds himself in community. And just as Adorno’s vision of the good life was necessarily embedded in reality as it was (rather than ensconced in an ahistorical outside),30 Khider traces the contours of a new German from the affordances of the old, imagining a language—and a community—more welcoming of those who currently do not find a secure and comfortable home in it.The chapter in which Khider proposes to get rid of tens of German prepositions and replace some of them with two, borrowed from the Qurʾan, provides a humorous answer to the much-debated question of the compatibility of Islam with Western values.31 It addresses anew the question “Who is we?” by zooming