Hun

The most hostile term that can be applied to a German. However, the original Huns were not a Germanic people, but a nomadic warlike Asian race that overran Europe in the fifth century under their barbaric warlord Attila, who arrogantly styled himself Flagellum Dei (the Scourge of God). Anglo-Saxon references to the Huns list them simply with other peoples like the Franks, but their name became a byword of cruelty during the Renaissance: “Companies or Armies of Huns, wandering up and down with most swift Horses, filled all things with slaughter and terrour” (Edward Topsell, The historie of four-footed beastes , London: William Jaggard, 1607, 226). Attila the Hun’s legendary reputation continues as a byword of ruth-lessness, albeit in the nomenclature of office politics and business hierarchies.

However, the term Hun fell out of general use for centuries, except as a historical reference. When revived in the early nineteenth century it meant a reckless and uncultured devastator, as Vandal still does. The Pall Mall Gazette of 1893 comments on “the marauding Huns, whose delight it is to trample on the flowers, burn the underwood and kill the birds and beasts” (May 3, 2). The specific application to the Germans was given, not by their enemies, as is usual with such hostile terms, but ironically, by Kaiser Wilhelm II himself. In an inflammatory speech given to German troops about to set sail for China on July 27, 1900, the Kaiser appealed to an atavistic, barbarian mythology in a way that now seems shockingly crude:

No quarter will be given, no prisoners will be taken. Let all who fall into your hands be at your mercy. Just as the Huns a thousand years ago, under the leadership of Etzel [Attila], gained a reputation in virtue [strength] of which they still live in historical tradition, so may the name of Germany become known in such a manner in China that no Chinaman will ever again even dare to look askance at a German.

( The Times , July 30, 1900, 3)

This extraordinary speech can be seen as the seed of what has become the stereotype of the “ugly” German: brutal, militaristic, jackbooted, and helmeted, upholding in Aryanism and in Nazism a diabolical mixture of warped ideology and gruesome pragmatism.

The troops evidently took the Kaiser’s words seriously, so that in November of the same year, in a debate in the Reichstag the Socialist leader August Bebel quoted from “the so-called ‘Letters from the Huns’ ( Hunnenbriefe ), epistles from German soldiers in China to their relatives at home giving an account of the cruelties which have been perpetrated by the army of occupation” ( The Times , November 21, 1900, 5). Unsurprisingly, the stereotype started to take hold. Rudyard Kipling wrote as far back as 1902 of “the shameless Hun” ( The Times , December 22, 9), and instances multiplied thereafter. The use of the definite article naturally has the effect of endorsing a stereotype. On May 21, 1941, The Times daringly printed a poem containing the line “I really loathe the bloody Hun,” provoking some controversy.

With passing of time and the emotive context of war, the term has lost some of its hostility, being often used in a slightly ironic fashion, as in “He’s bought a big solid Hun car.” In British English the term has always referred specifically to the Germans, but in the United States, hun has erroneously been used to mean a Hungarian and taken to be the root of hunky , later honky . Hun is not generally current in other global varieties of English, except among the diminishing circle of war veterans.