This monograph seeks to examine certain issues in the history of linguistics that we consider useful and important, based on a narrative approach to their analysis and description. These topics include Wilhelm von Humboldt's scientific legacy, its significance for German philosophy of language from the 18th to the 20th century, the problem of interaction between a linguistic community and a worldview that began with Humboldt, language and race, the perception of personality and Humboldt's ideas in Nazi Germany, as well as the fate of those concepts that, to varying degrees, referred to his ideas as predecessors (the "Word and Object" movement, Karl Voßler's Aesthetic Idealism) and tried to survive under the pressure of Nazi tyranny. A separate chapter is dedicated to linguistic identities in the "Third Reich".