BENDING
SPINES
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BENDING
SPINES
THE PROPAGANDAS
OF NAZI GERMANY
AND THE GERMAN
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC
M M M M
Randall L. Bytwerk
Michigan State University Press
East Lansing
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Copyright © 2004 by Randall L. Bytwerk
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).
Michigan State University Press
East Lansing, Michigan 48823-5245
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Bytwerk, Randall L.
Bending spines : the propagandas of Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic / Randall L. Bytwerk.
p. cm.— (Rhetoric and public affairs series)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-87013-709-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 0-87013-710-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Propaganda—Germany—History. 2. Nazi propaganda. I. Title. II. Series.
JN3971.A69P8524 2004
303.3′75′094309043—dc22
2004000275
Rhetoric and Public Affairs Series Editorial Board
Denise M. Bostdorff, College of Wooster
G. Thomas Goodnight, Northwestern University
Robert Hariman, Drake University
Marouf Aziz Hasian Jr., University of Utah
David Henry, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
J. Michael Hogan, Penn State University
Robert L. Ivie, Indiana University
Jay Mechling, University of California, Davis
John M. Murphy, University of Georgia
David Zarefsky, Northwestern University
Barbie Zelizer, University of Pennsylvania
Michigan State University Press is a member of the Green Press Initiative and is committed to developing and encouraging ecologically responsible publishing practices. For more information about the Green Press Initiative and the use of recycled paper in book publishing, please visit www.greenpressinitiative.org.
Book and Cover design by Sans Serif, Inc.
Visit Michigan State University Press on the World Wide Web at: www.msupress.msu.edu
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For Robert L. Bytwerk,
who gave me a good start
and who has been a steady help along the way
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Contents
Acknowledgments
ix
Terms and Abbreviations
xi
Introduction
1
Chapter 1:
SECULAR FAITHS
11
Chapter 2:
DOCTRINES
41
Chapter 3:
HIERARCHIES
57
Chapter 4:
EVANGELISTS
71
Chapter 5:
MAPS OF REALITY
89
Chapter 6:
ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT
109
Chapter 7:
PUBLIC AND PRIVATE LIFE
131
Chapter 8:
THE FAILURE OF PROPAGANDA
155
Notes
171
Selected Bibliography
205
Index
223
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Acknowledgments
The research was supported by Calvin College, which provided a sabbat-ical, other time for travel and research, and an environment conducive to writing because one has something to say rather than because one has to.
The archivists and librarians at the Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR im Bundesarchiv in Berlin oversee a pleasant working environment, and they know their holdings.
Colleagues have taken the time to read drafts of the manuscript and give responses that sharpened my thinking and rescued me from error. Robert D. Brooks, who first prompted my interest in the topic thirty years ago (and it did take some prompting), gave me most helpful counsel. John Rodden did, too. My Calvin colleagues David Diephouse, Barbara Carvill, and Wally Bratt offered good advice. My departmental colleague Quentin J. Schultze gave the penultimate draft a thorough reading tha
t reminded me of what a prince among colleagues he is. The three people who reviewed the manuscript for Michigan State University Press made a variety of suggestions, many of which I took with thanks.
My friends who were once citizens of the German Democratic Republic have stimulated my thinking in many ways. I particularly thank Pastor Wolfgang and Cornelia Gröger, the Kalinkat family, Günter Gießler, and Christa Fischer. They offered friendship and hospitality both before and after 1989.
Sharon and David Bytwerk took the annoyances of a husband and father writing a book in good cheer.
I thank the publishers of the following essays for permission to incorporate parts of them into this book.
• “Und Ihr habt doch gesiegt: Rhetorical Aspects of a Nazi Holiday” originally appeared in ETC: A Review of General Semantics 36 (1979): 134–146, published by the International Society for General Semantics, Concord, California.
• “The Dolt Laughs: Satirical Publications under Hitler and Honecker” originally appeared in Journalism Quarterly 69 (1992): 1029–1038.
• “The Failure of the Propaganda of the German Democratic Republic” originally appeared in Quarterly Journal of Speech 85 (1999): 400–416.
ix
x
Acknowledgments
• “The Propagandas of Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic” originally appeared in Communication Studies 49 (1998): 158–171.
• “The Pleasures of Unanimity in the GDR” originally appeared in After the GDR: New Perspectives on the Old GDR and the Young Länder. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001) 109–124.
Terms and Abbreviations
ADN: The GDR news agency
Bezirk: One of fourteen GDR districts
DAF: German Labor Front
DEFA: GDR film production company
DSF: Society for German-Soviet Friendship
FDGB: Free German Trade Union
FDJ: Free German Youth
Gau: A Nazi party region
GDR: German Democratic Republic
GPA: German Propaganda Archive
Kreis: Roughly the equivalent of an American county NSDAP: National Socialist German Workers Party
OKW: Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht
RKK: Reich Chamber of Culture
RMVP: Reich Ministry for People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda RPL: Reich Central Propaganda Office
SA: “Brown Shirts,” or Storm Troopers
SAPMO: The repository of East German party and mass organization records, part of the German Federal Archives
SD: Security Service of the SS
SED: Socialist Unity Party of Germany
SS: “Black Shirts,” the elite Nazi paramilitary organization ZK: Central Committee of the SED
xi
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Introduction
A pastor who lived through the Third Reich described his meetings with Nazi officials in a way that illuminates life in totalitarian societies: “[O]ne would be pushed further, step by step, until he had crossed over the line, without noticing that his spine was being bent millimeter by millimeter.”1
The Nazis he met with knew that persuasion is a gradual process with many methods.
Just after Nikita Khrushchev’s famous speech that revealed some of Stalin’s depravity, Johannes R. Becher, author of the GDR’s national anthem and minister of culture, wrote a poem that remained unpublished until 2000. It was titled “Burnt Child”:
He who has had his spine broken
Is hardly to be persuaded
To stand up straight.
The memory of the broken spine
Terrifies him.
Even when the break
Has long since healed,
And there is no longer any danger
Of breaking his spine.2
The poem may be a confession. In any event, it was published only long after Becher’s death.
National Socialism and Marxism-Leninism put enormous effort into bending, and sometimes breaking, spines—a process for which both found propaganda necessary. The two German systems differ in many ways. One is the mark of vivid evil, the other leaves images of gray old men in color-less cities. The Nazi villain is a regular in film and fiction. Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) is the quintessential propaganda film. The GDR
left nothing that makes evil as striking. GDR writer Volker Braun once called it “the most boring country on earth.”3 Some agree with Margherita von Brentano that “the mere comparison of the Third Reich with the GDR
is a dreadful oversimplification. The Third Reich left mountains of corpses.
The GDR left mountains of files.”4
The differences between the systems should not be ignored but neither should the similarities. Both used propaganda to attempt to build new 1
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2
Introduction
societies in which people were to share almost unanimously a common worldview of religious proportions, what some today call a hegemonic metanarrative, with little room for opposing versions of truth. Both greatly reduced opportunities for open discourse, rendering it difficult and perhaps even impossible for them and their citizens to correct the evils their governments caused. The extent to which the propagandas of two systems close in time and rooted in the same history and culture, yet widely varying in ideology, are similar or different will say something about the larger nature of propaganda in the modern world.
But what is this thing called propaganda? There are about as many definitions as there are writers. F. M. Cornford has my favorite—“The art of very nearly deceiving one’s friends without quite deceiving one’s enemies”—but that is not a practical definition. Part of the problem is that there are conflicting views of propaganda.5 Western democracies have feared propaganda and at least in public oppose it. To call someone a propagandist is an insult. Propaganda is seen as a manipulative tool of dictatorships. The foreign propaganda branch of the U.S. government is called the United States Information Agency, and it is prohibited from broadcasting to the United States itself for fear that propaganda masquerading as information could have an untoward effect at home. Propaganda was also suspect in Germany before the Nazi takeover. A scholarly book published in 1924 began with these words: “Even the word propaganda sounds very unpleasant to us Germans.”6 Propaganda was widely seen as something the deceitful Allies had used to deceive honest Germans, a belief encouraged by arguments that Germany lost World War I because it had been
“stabbed in the back” by traitors at home.
The great dictatorships of the twentieth century took a different view. To them, propaganda was a necessary and beneficial phenomenon. The Nazis established a state Ministry for People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda (RMVP) under Joseph Goebbels. The GDR handled propaganda from party offices. Both, however, built comprehensive systems to influence public opinion and behavior. Social progress depended on new evangelists or social technicians, particularly the propagandists.
The Nazis went so far as to defend the reputation of propaganda by trying to restrict the term to their activities. A 1942 injunction to Nazi propagandists ordered them to guard the word’s good name: “The term propaganda should be used only in a positive sense and only for propaganda coming from Germany.” The word “agitation” was to be used for This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:31 UTC
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Introduction
3
enemy attempts to influence public opinion.7 Regular restatements of the policy suggest its lack of success.8
; Although the GDR used the term “propaganda” to refer to enemy behavior, it stressed that Marxist-Leninist propaganda was a virtuous activity in contrast to reactionary capitalist propaganda. Following the Soviet distinction, the GDR divided propaganda into two related fields: propaganda and agitation. As the standard GDR dictionary of political terms put it:
“Propaganda is a central part of ideological work, the heart of the entire activity of the party.”9 It presented the teachings of Marxism-Leninism in depth to those who then reached the masses with agitation. Agitation was defined as “that part of the political leadership of the society by the party of the working class that brings the word of the party to the masses.” According to the Soviet approach, the propagandist conveys many ideas to one or a few persons; an agitator conveys only one or a few ideas but to a great mass of people. As an underground joke in the GDR put it, propaganda provided the scientific foundation for the trip down the broad highway to the bright future of Communism, whereas agitation explained away the detours and potholes.
The approach I use in this book comes from the work of Jacques Ellul. He defines the term broadly: “Propaganda is a set of methods employed by an organized group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in its actions of a mass of individuals, psychologically unified through psychological manipulation and incorporated in an organization.”10 Ellul sees propaganda not only in its obvious manifestations (for example, mass meetings, newspapers, and posters) but also in the wider social context. It includes education, the arts, public behavior, and the whole panoply of modern technique and method. It is the totality of means by which humans are persuaded to accept the powers that be and depends not only on telling people things but also on securing their cooperation, persuading them to behave in ways that support the system and reinforce desired attitudes.
Ellul views propaganda as more than the mere attempt of political leaders to manipulate followers: “The propagandee is by no means just an innocent victim. He provides the psychological action of propaganda, and not merely leads himself to it, but even derives satisfaction from it. Without this previous, implicit consent, without this need for propaganda experienced by practically every citizen of the technological age, propaganda could not spread. There is not just a wicked propagandist at work who sets up means to ensnare the innocent citizen. Rather, there is a citizen who This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:31 UTC
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4
Introduction
The Propagandas of Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic Page 1
