14 SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2020WHEN MARTIN PUCHNERwas growing up
in a rowhouse in Nuremberg in the early
1970s, strangers would show up at the door
asking for food. His mother served them
water and sandwiches, standing in the
doorway while the visitors made conversa-
tion in a language the boy could not under-
stand, even though the words were mostly
German. Later, his uncle pointed out to
him what it was that drew these strangers
to the house: Carved into the foundation
stone was the sign of a cross inside a circle.
To those in the know, it signified that the
house’s occupants would give you food.
Those in the know were all manner of va-
grants: tinkers, knife grinders, peddlers,
journeymen — people without a fixed
abode. The pictograms they carved into
fence posts or chalked on houses were
called zinken, after the Latin signum, for
sign. The language they spoke was
Rotwelsch, a mix of Yiddish, Hebrew and
repurposed German that had been used
for centuries by members of the itinerant
underground. Puchner’s father called
them “people eternally on the road, escap-
ing to nowhere.”
Today Puchner is a professor of English
and comparative literature at Harvard and
the editor of the Norton Anthology of
World Literature. A previous book, “The
Written World,” investigated the origins of
literature. But with his latest work he turns
his attention to a language that has no liter-
ature, a system of communication de-
signed to evade capture by scholars. As his
title — “The Language of Thieves: My
Family’s Obsession With a Secret Code the
Nazis Tried to Eliminate” — suggests, it is
a deeply personal project, one that probes
the meaning of language and family, inher-
itance and debt.
Both Puchner’s father and uncle were
drawn to Rotwelsch and sprinkled words
from it into their speech. As a boy, Puchner
delighted in zesty phrases like “making a
rabbit,” which meant making a quick es-
cape. On hikes, his father taught him to
spot zinkenon roadsides and farmhouses.
Though his parents were solidly middle
class, Puchner writes, “I grew up feeling
that I had a special connection to the road
and the itinerant underground.” In his fam-
ily, he felt, “Rotwelsch became our special
possession, our secret.”
But there was another secret that con-
nected Puchner to Rotwelsch. As a gradu-
ate student at Harvard, he looked up writ-
ings by his grandfather Karl Puchner in
the university’s Widener Library. The
grandfather had been a historian of names
in Germany, and Puchner thought he
would make a good case for testing the
scope of the library’s famed collection.
Sure enough, Widener had Karl Puchn-
er’s doctoral dissertation from 1932 and a
few scholarly articles. But along with dry
histories of the patron saints of Bavarian
monasteries, Martin Puchner discovered
something that shocked him: an article
showing that his grandfather had enthusi-
astically embraced Nazi ideas, including
Hitler’s fantasy of racial purity. The article,
which was based on a lecture, proposed
eliminating Jewish names that were indis-
tinguishable from German ones — a sign,
to Karl Puchner, of Jewish shiftiness andcriminal intent. Linguistic mixing, he ar-
gued, was “disgusting” and never more so
than in the “muddy waters” of Rotwelsch,
the Yiddish-inflected language of criminal
gangs.
This troubling discovery spurred Puch-
ner to learn more about Rotwelsch and his
family’s relationship to it. He soon realized
that the study and the persecution of the
language were deeply intertwined.
Rotwelsch developed in the High Middle
Ages and spread across Central Europe in
the wake of the Thirty Years’ War.
“Welsch” meant “incomprehensible”;
“rot” was derived from a word for “beg-
gar.” Rotwelsch was thus the incompre-
hensible language of beggars.
Technically, Rotwelsch is not a language
(because it doesn’t have its own grammar)
but a sociolect — a system of communica-
tion that binds members of a community
together and keeps outsiders in the dark.
Among the many Rotwelsch terms for po-
lice are the German words for bull, lanternand moonlight. But a substantial amount of
Rotwelsch is derived from Hebrew and
Yiddish, such as gannef,for thief. This infu-
sion probably reflects the large number of
Jews forced into itinerant professions in
the Early Modern period because of laws
banning them from landownership and
many trades. According to Puchner’s re-
search, however, the great majority of
Rotwelsch speakers were in fact not Jews.
That didn’t stop anti-Semites from asso-
ciating Rotwelsch with Jews and crime.
The most influential example was Martin
Luther, who nourished a zealous hatred of
Jews as well as of fraudulent itinerant
monks who preyed on the gullible and the
pious. In 1528 he republished an earlier
anonymous screed against false beggars,
the “Liber Vagatorum,” adding a glossary
of words in Rotwelsch, a language Luther
said “comes from the Jews.” The list in-
cluded the words sefel, for dirt; and mol-
samer, for traitor.The intended message was clear:
Rotwelsch was a thieves’ cant peppered
with “Jewish” words because the Jews
were by nature deceitful. Puchner shows
how Luther’s screed set the tone not only
for his own grandfather’s portrayal of
Rotwelsch as a language polluted by Yid-
dish that threatened German racial purity.
It also laid the groundwork for centuries of
linguistic engagement with Rotwelsch by
people intent on eradicating it. His re-
search is complicated by the fact that most
historical sources on Rotwelsch come from
police archives. Often, such records con-
tain translations of words and phrases ex-
tracted under interrogation, in an effort to
understand how a gang might have
planned a heist or defrauded a villager. The
speakers of the language were frequently
illiterate, and in any case had no inclina-
tion to teach it to outsiders.
“No one felt that it was a problem that
Rotwelsch was not written down,” Puchner
writes, “except for the unintended conse-quence that the entire written record on
Rotwelsch was therefore written by its en-
emies, people like Luther and my grandfa-
ther who wanted it eliminated. And pro-
ducing a record of this language, for most
of them, was precisely the way in which
they wanted to eliminate it.”
Even so, Puchner finds distant allies
who share his fascination with Rotwelsch.
A 19th-century jurist and policeman
named Friedrich Avé-Lallemant studied
its sociological context. Kafka saw the lit-
erary potential of a language predicated on
estrangement and mobility of meaning. In
this respect, he found Rotwelsch similar to
Yiddish, an invigorating force that could
“rake up” German — “as if the language
were a lawn that needed to be aerated,” in
Puchner’s astute phrase.
That seems to have been the motivation
that drove Puchner’s uncle, Günter Puch-
ner, to study Rotwelsch and lobby for its lit-
erary rehabilitation. Having taught him-
self as much as possible through records
and by befriending vagrants who spoke it,
he published a primer, wrote poetry in
Rotwelsch and even translated literary
works into the language, including a syn-
optic Bible, passages from “Romeo and Ju-
liet” and the text of the German national
anthem.
Puchner shares none of his uncle’s opti-
mism. Without using the word “appropria-
tion” he recognizes that his initial hope to
pay homage to Rotwelsch, “mitigating as
best as I could the centuries of prosecution
inflicted on these speakers by settled soci-
ety,” was ultimately a self-serving story de-
signed to exorcise his grandfather’s guilt.
With his emphasis on persecution and
exclusion, Puchner bathes his subject in a
rose-colored tint. The incidents of fraud or
theft often associated with Rotwelsch
seem to belong to a Robin Hood world of
victimless crimes. When he presents the
zinkenfor “a woman open to sexual con-
tact” — bare breasts and arrow — he
shows no concern for the safety of the per-
son branded in this way.
While Puchner’s enthusiasm sometimes
leads him to overstate Rotwelsch’s signifi-
cance — Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” becomes a
struggle against the language — it inspires
illuminating detours into subjects like the
history of Esperanto and the birth of simul-
taneous interpretation at the Nuremberg
trials.
What endures is his fascination with the
resourcefulness and resilience of genera-
tions of travelers, like the ones who came
to his childhood home in Nuremberg,
drawn by a hidden zinken.
“Their words for police, for being ar-
rested, their zinkenabout begging and
stealing, the rich vocabulary of food, drink,
sex and lice, all this spoke volumes about
their lived experience,” he writes.
“Rotwelsch was like a worn tool that bore
the traces of its earlier use. By studying it
closely, one could tell a lot about the bodies
that had wielded it.” 0Code of Silence
The secret language used by vagabonds across Europe for centuries.
By CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM
THE LANGUAGE OF THIEVES
My Family’s Obsession With a Secret Code
the Nazis Tried to Eliminate
By Martin Puchner
Illustrated. 278 pp. W.W. Norton & Company.
$26.95.
A series of Zinken, or symbols, used by itinerant speakers of Rotwelsch in Europe.IMAGE VIA MARTIN PUCHNERCORINNA DA FONSECA-WOLLHEIMis a contribut-
ing music critic for The Times and the founder
of Beginner’s Ear, a music and meditation
series.