This paper has two parts. First, I will present and contextualize the notion of “holy terror before the language” as a component of an educational ideal presented in Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Future of Our Educational Institutions (1872). Then, I will explore intersections and conflicts between this notion and some typical anti-populist approaches to the rhetoric and media strategies applied by contemporary populist movements in Europe and in the USA.

I argue that that the view formulated in Nietzsche’s proposals for a reform of the German educational system, suggesting a form of writing instruction where the less apt students learn to keep their silence, constitutes a both untenable and inescapable position in the anti-populist discourse. Its untenability comes from the fact that it goes against the almost universally held educational ideal of enfranchisement for everyone, thus also for politicians and other partakers in the public debate (e.g., contributors to newspaper comment sections) who – from the anti-populist perspective – are commonly considered verbally less apt; less literate in today’s common, extended sense of the word. At the same time, it is not easy to imagine an anti-populist stance that does not include an ethically founded critique of populist uses of literacy, a critique that necessarily must have as an objective to limit their presence in the public debate. As long as ideas of censorship or other forms of external routing or shaping of the debate are excluded, the Nietzschean plea for a form of writing instruction that also includes instilling a sense of terror before the language (i.e. for some of its uses or users) appears to be inescapable.

When presenting the notion of “holy terror before the language” in the context of Nietzsche’s argument, I take some discrepancies between two English versions of the text as a point of departure (Nietzsche 2004 and 2016). In the most recent translation, the words “heilige[r] Schreck vor der Sprache” are rendered as “a pious awe for the language”. Although this rendering may be acceptable from a linguistic point of view, it can also be seen as symptomatic of a de-historicizing or even apologetic approach to the views on education (“Bildung”) that Nietzsche stated in his 1872 lectures. Whereas it has become customary to consider the skepticism against governmental influence on the higher education system as a main tenet in the lectures (e.g., Reitter & Wellmon 2016) – or even to attempt to implement Nietzsche’s thoughts as principles for a school reform (e.g., Bloch 1978) – I argue that a historically adequate approach to this text should rather start with a consideration of the post-romantic idea of “Genie”, and with the extreme elitism that is proponed in the lectures. I consider the centrality of these notions as an argument for assuming that the notion of aptness (“Begabung”) for writing also – and perhaps primarily – should be seen as an ethical disposition.

To exemplify the paradoxical situation connected with the notion of “terror before the language” in anti-populist discourses, I choose two rather different subjects. First, I argue that the untenability-and-inescapability of this notion can be seen as a factor that steers the academic approaches towards perspectives where the media, today especially the Internet, – rather than the ethical and intellectual habitus of the general public itself – are seen as the cause of the rise of populism. Second, I discuss some typical examples of criticism against the language of Trumpism, omnipresent in European media during the last year, and their relationship to the (paradox of the) Nietzschean ideal.

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