Daddy: Motifs | SparkNotes

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Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

References to Nazi-era Germany

For many readers, the most controversial aspect of “Daddy” relates to the poem’s numerous references to Nazi-era Germany. Most of these references appear in the poem’s middle stanzas, where the speaker symbolically aligns herself with the victims of the Holocaust:

And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

In these lines (30–35), the speaker implicitly conflates the German language with the violence committed by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Like the gas used to murder Jewish people in the concentration camps at Dachau, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen, the speaker claims that the German language itself is killing her—“chuffing [her] off.” Later in the poem, the speaker identifies her father as “a Fascist” (line 48) who bore all the hallmarks of Nazism:

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.

Here (lines 41–47), the speaker links her father to the German air force (“Luftwaffe”) and to German armored tanks (“Panzer-man”). She also refers to the swastika, which was the dominant symbol for the Third Reich. Taken together, these and other references controversially equate the speaker’s father to the Nazis and her own suffering to that of Jewish victims, an equivalence that is clearly a gross overstatement.

German Words

German words appear throughout “Daddy,” supplementing the speaker’s references to her German father and to Nazi-era Germany. The first use of German appears at the end of stanza 3, when the speaker concludes the initial address to her father with the following words: “Ach, du” (15). Translated into English, these words mean, “Oh, you.” The use of the informal pronoun “du” (instead of the formal pronoun, “Sie”) conveys a sense of familiarity and comfort that quickly dissipates in subsequent stanzas. In lines 24–28, for instance, the speaker invokes the German first-person pronoun “ich”—or, “I”—to evoke her fearful inability to speak to her father when she was a child:

I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.

The speaker reaffirms this fear later in the poem, in lines 41–42:

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.

The word “Luftwaffe” refers to the German air force, but the more important word here is “gobbledygoo,” a nonsense word meant to imply that the German language sounds ridiculous to her. In each of these examples, the speaker’s references to the German language are connected to her father, and they all emphasize feelings of obscurity and fear. Not only can she not understand or speak the language, but the words also inspire terror—just like her father.

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