rhabarberrhabarber, they probably have no idea that the foreign vegetable they refer to carries in its name, rha barbaron (rhubarb), the very foreignness that the sound of the non-word evokes. Adults in Greek antiquity introduced the onomatopoetic sound when they characterized all non-Greek speaking foreigners as barbaroi. Thus, barbarian was a language-based denotation for all foreigners, including those who are not at all barbaric. The moral tainting of linguistic difference came much later-and with it the linguistic exclusion, which will be the topic of my talk today.I take my cues from the printed program of this conference which states that "the concepts of a national community based on ancestral lineage and cultural heritage have been called into question." In the following, I would like to distinguish more clearly between blood line on the one hand and cultural, especially linguistic tradition on the other and suggest that, while the rhetoric of the first is losing, the rhetoric of the second is gaining momentum. The recent culture wars concerning bilingualism in the U.S. are only one strong indication of this trend. 1 Another is the fact that many of the 100,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union who were identified as Jews in Russia are now treated as Russians in Germany, because their ethnic identification gave way to linguistic identification.If we follow Benedict Anderson's assertion "that from the start the nation was conceived in language, not in blood," 2 we must, however, also recognize the obvious, namely that the German evidence of racist exclusion on the basis of blood is so overwhelming that the exclusion on the basis of language has received much too little attention. Germany's long tradition of basing identity on deutsches Blut, i.e. on ius sanguinis as opposed to ius soli as it is practiced in the U.S., was modified only recently in new citizenship laws. As a consequence, the question of whether it was biological or linguistic essentialism that has shaped the German discourse on national identity could gain new currency. In fact, recent attempts at linguistic essentialism recall a philosophical tradition going back all the way to Herder's and Wilhelm von Humboldt's idea that language is the vessel for "eine eigenthümliche Weltansicht" 3 (a particular world view) and to the Romantic concept of release from alienation through language, as in Novalis's famous line "Dann fliegt von Einem geheimen Wort / Das ganze verkehrte Wesen fort." 4 (Then with the help of a single, secret word the entire falseness dissipates) The belief in the redemptive power of language seems to lurk in the backs of minds of people who try to stem the tide of immigrants by questioning their degree of language proficiency and thus their ability to fully participate in what the CDU politician Friedrich Merz called in 2000 "deutsche Leitkultur" as a gauge for the integration of foreigners. 5 Their concern about languagebased cultural values, which reflect a particularly German Weltansicht, implies a belief in the purit...