I attended UC San Diego in the late 1970s as a German major. One of the leading lights of the department faculty was Reinhard Lettau, with whom I had several classes and a couple of seminars. I fondly remember the one on Goethe, held with just three other senior undergraduates in his office over coffee and cigarettes–different times, indeed! He was frequently present at German Club social functions, and I was often a visitor at his home in Del Mar, although not on a direct personal level. I was there for parties and other events, usually through the German Club.
I recently started reading his last novel Fürcht vor Gästen (“Fear of Guests”), and I must say the profesor I knew showed little of the demanding and exacting quality shown by the narrator of this book. And I was curious about the man, so I looked him up in the German version of Wikipedia. (He was pretty much a German-only phenomenon; he didn’t achieve sufficient renown outside the German cultural realm to be widely known elsewhere).
Among other things the Wikipedia article says:
And this is my question: the verb Anprangern, according to the LEO Online German Dictionary means “denounce” or “decry”. But is that all it is? If so, why was he deported? Surely one doesn’t get deported for denouncing a publisher? The article is sketchy and may be leaving out other things that may have led to his being forcibly driven to the airport, or whatever it is they do when you are deported. He had a repuation for being quite left-wing, as most of the German-born faculty did (Marcuse left a year or two before I got there). But whatever this was that happened at FUB wasn’t ever mentioned. I don’t think any of us even knew to ask about it; we didn’t have easy access to German encyclopedias and other reference works in those days, not even in a large university library.
Anprangern would be well rendered by the translations ‘denounce’ and ‘decry’ - it covers forceful but not necessary excessive or infamatory denunciations. (the literal derivation is ‘to put into the stocks’, i.e. to expose the object of criticism to public criticism figuratively equivalent to being exposed in the stocks in the marketspace). It’s not very strong - you’ll read the verb anprangern daily in the papers in reference of some politician or activist denouncing something or other.
The 1996 obit in the ‘Berliner Zeitung’ cites from a 1967 speech as denouncing the Berlin press as ‘polizeihörig und servil’ (in thrall to the police and servile, i.e. not stepping up to the duty of the press to be critical of authority). That would not have been criminal libel even then IMO but publisher Axel Springer (who owned the papers in question) would not have been amused - my WAG would be that he might well have pulled a few strings to have the book thrown at Lettau for some technical problem in his status as a resident alien. (The obit notes that this was reversed some weeks later, after protests).
German society was much more illiberal in 1967 compared with post-1968 - the major changes seem to have been in the late 1960s and the 1970s.
I think then the English equivalent would be “to pillory” someone, pillory being another word for stocks. I’m not sure that isn’t a strictly American term, what with its association with early Pilgrm and Puritan settlers.