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Linguistic Politics and Conceptual Struggle over the Nazi Memories Inho Na(Daegu University) How the Germans have made efforts to overcome the Nazi past is well introduced by many Korean historians who try to make a comparison between Korean and German historical processes of past conquest. But the German linguistic politics over the Nazi criminal past receives no attention, even though it has been continuously an important element in the history of the Nazi past conquest. This paper tried to fill such vacuum. The linguistic politics over the Nazi criminal past, which has been always controversial, means the normative control of ‘historically correct speech’ related to the Nazi past as well as the criticism of the Nazi vocabulary and concepts. The German controversy over the linguistic politics related to the Nazi past began immediately after 1945 and continued to be intensified through the late 1980s. It can be divided into two phases: 1. The first is characterized by the criticism of the Nazi language and the anti-criticism of this in the context of denazification. The critics of the Nazi words like Viktor Klemperer and a group of philologists tried to build a warning monument which should serve to memorize the ‘corrupted language’ of the Nazism. Through this, they wanted to exclude the Nazi vocabulary and concepts from the public discourses in the German society. 2. During the Conservatives and Progressives competed for the preoccupation of the meanings of important concepts in the 1970s, the linguistic politics was magnified. In such situation, since the mid-1980s appeared the second phase in which the positive linguistic politics for establishing the ‘correct memory’ proceeded. The progressives called as ‘left’ in Germany made an effort to draw a normative boundary between what is ‘sayable’ and not ‘sayable’, that is, to establish a strict linguistic norm related to the Nazi past. On the contrary, the conservatives tried to extend the limit of what is ‘sayable’, criticizing the linguistic politics of the ‘left’ which they denunciated as ‘political correctness’.