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Jews. The camp was portrayed as an example of heroic Communist resistance against Nazism: “The first inmates were German anti-fascists. Un-yielding, firmly convinced of the justice of their cause and of its ultimate triumph, they did not abandon their struggle. They embodied the better Germany, they saved the honour of the German nation.”78 Buchenwald’s significance was strengthened because Thälmann had been killed there.
Political prisoners were in fact the major victims of Buchenwald, but even when discussing the concentration camps as a whole, the pamphlet gives no hint of the magnitude of Jewish deaths.
Like the Nazis, the SED tried to develop appropriate rituals of birth, marriage, and death but did not put nearly the energy into them that the Nazis did. Occasional books of texts suitable for such occasions appeared.
As one of them published in 1961 observed: “In holidays and ceremonies, workers and their families should above all sense the meaning and content of our socialist life, to comprehend it and be encouraged to contemplate.”79
The GDR lacked the equivalent of Die neue Gemeinschaft and produced considerably less material overall on ceremonies. By the end of the GDR, efforts at elaborate socialist marriage and christening ceremonies had largely ended. The Jugendweihe was the one exception. To its last days, the GDR
put substantial energy into impressive festivities for the youth.
The Socialist Faith
Marxism-Leninism presented a world that followed discoverable laws, laws that if obeyed would lead to a wonderful future. Marxist-Leninist theory explained where human society had come from and where it was headed.
Its followers were “on the side of history,” proponents of a cause that could not fail. To be a Marxist-Leninist was to be a modern, scientific person whose actions served great goals.
Still, the GDR energetically supported traditional German virtues. Perhaps the most vivid example is Walter Ulbricht’s “Ten Commandments for the New Socialist Person,” revealed at the V. Party Congress in 1958: 1. You should always work for the international solidarity of the working class and all workers as well as for the unbreakable alliance with all socialist nations.
2. You should love your Fatherland and always be ready to give your whole strength and ability to defend the workers’ and farmers’ might.
3. You should help to eliminate the exploitation of people by other people.
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4. You should do good work for socialism, for socialism leads to a better life for the workers.
5. You should act to build socialism through mutual help and comradely cooperation, esteem the collective, and take to heart its criticism.
6. You should protect and increase the people’s property.
7. You should strive constantly to increase your achievements, be economical, and strengthen socialist labor discipline.
8. You should educate your children in the spirit of peace and socialism, raising people with broad knowledge, firm character, and strong bodies.
9. You should be clean, live decently, and respect your family.
10. You should express solidarity with the peoples fighting for their national liberation or who are defending their national independence.80
With appropriate modifications, most of Ulbricht’s commandments could have been made consistent with the Nazi principle that “the common good comes before the individual good.”
A wide variety of similar propaganda throughout the GDR’s history promoted traditional German virtues to which few objected. These virtues were presented as contributing to the glorious cause of socialism. As a 1983
book on rearing well-behaved children put it: “For us, good behavior is applied socialist morality, a part of the socialist style of life.”81 Ethical behavior was grounded in the socialist worldview.
The end of socialism was the paradise of Communism, never clearly described and always in the future. A 1976 GDR poster gave an enticing vision: “Communism is the bright future of humanity. Under it all forms of exploitation and oppression are eliminated, and people are free of the scourge of war. Communism is the world of peace, labor, equality and brotherhood. Under Communism, all the nations of the earth and their peoples will be able to develop fully their abilities and talents.”82 Whatever the Communist heaven might look like, its achievement justified the hard-ships and challenges of the present. It was a goal of such cheering prospects as to make possible enduring the weaknesses of the transitional socialist state. As a 1978 book stated, this also required “a new type of human being,” to be formed through the whole process of social life.83 According to Marxist-Leninist theory, human nature was malleable, more the consequence of the objective environment surrounding it than innate human characteristics. Changing the environment would change human beings.
Capitalism played the role of the devil in Marxism-Leninism. It did not have the same status as the marker of absolute evil as the Jew in Nazism, since Marxism-Leninism saw capitalism as a necessary step in human This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:33 UTC
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progress. However, once capitalism’s time had passed, it became a force for evil. Thus the eventual triumph of socialism depended on the complete elimination of capitalism. Marxist literature is filled with attacks on capitalism that put the battle between systems in the form of the struggle between good and evil. A typical passage comes from a 1973 booklet for military education: “This struggle [between socialism and capitalism] is a bitter world-wide class conflict. There is no field on which it does not rage.
Above all, it is intensifying in the ideological realm, in the battle for the minds and hearts of humanity.”84 As the final edition of the GDR’s political dictionary put it, capitalism had become a threat to the existence of humanity.85 Only after the complete elimination of capitalism would the world reach its final and happy state. The struggle against capitalism justified otherwise inexplicable aspects of GDR policy. The Berlin Wall, the domestic spy system, economic difficulties, all were temporary necessities in the worldwide battle against reactionary capitalism.
Like Nazism, then, socialism rooted its ideas in purportedly eternal scientific laws, encouraged citizens to work and sacrifice for fine-sounding goals that would lead to a blessed future, established pseudoreligious rituals and ceremonies, and saw a world where good fought evil.
Summary
Totalitarianism is a comprehensive phenomenon that aims to influence every area of life. As Václav Havel observed, it “commands an incomparably more precise, logically structured, generally comprehensible and, in essence, extremely flexible ideology that, in its elaborateness and completeness, is almost a secularized religion. It offers a ready answer to any question whatsoever; it can scarcely be accepted only in part, and accept-ing it has profound implications for human life.”86 Both National Socialism and Marxism-Leninism used propaganda as part of an effort to bring all aspects of life under the influence of the party. Both developed the external characteristics of a religion: eternal forces, absolute truths, sacred texts, ways of secular worship.
National Socialism’s ideology allowed it to make specifically religious claims. As we shall see in Chapter 7, that forced on it the same conflict many standard religions face with other religions: to tolerate a competing religious worldview is to weaken one’s own. Despite the claim of its party platform that the NSDAP favored “positive Christianity,” Christian and Nazi claims to truth were inherently incompatible, a fact realized by leaders on This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:33 UTC
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cular Faiths
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both sides. The only way Nazism could deal with Christianity was to deny its claim to be a worldview. Thus Nazism tried to force the church to limit its activities to cultic ceremonies, to leave matters outside the church door and the individual soul to the party.
The GDR faced a less critical conflict. Its Marxist-Leninist atheistic foundation compelled it to resist the broader Christian claim to truth. Unlike Nazism, it said explicitly that religion was a remnant of the past, inconsistent with the “scientific” principles of Marxism-Leninism. Given the strong cultural hold of Christianity in Germany, it would have been unwise to combat it with the same energy that was sometimes used in the Soviet Union. And at times the church’s goals and the party’s goals coincided (for example, on peace issues or the Luther anniversary in 1983), allowing Christians to be seen as holdovers of an antiquated system that could still point its adherents in the correct direction. Still, Marxism-Leninism’s ac-commodations with Christianity were clearly just that. It had no need to suggest that the worldviews at their core were compatible. Since history was on its side, it could wait until the flow of history washed its religious adversary away.
Nazism was sectarian. It was not, the Nazis claimed, “an export item”
but rather a form of government suited only to the Germans. In practice this meant that Marxist-Leninist propaganda had a much wider audience than National Socialist propaganda. Marxism-Leninism was universal in its claim. Communism could come only when socialism had replaced other forms of government throughout the world. There was no reason at all for someone in Asia or Africa to accept Nazism, whereas Marxism-Leninism promised a secular millennium to all. Marxism-Leninism’s universal appeal gave it a considerable propaganda advantage when speaking to world audiences.
Both systems fretted about the faith of the coming generation. The Nazis limited admission to their speaker corps to those who had been members prior to 1933 and worried about the influx of members after 1933 who joined the party for pragmatic reasons. The GDR faced a problem in the 1980s as the founding generation aged and did not trust the younger generation to carry on the struggle with the necessary vigor. Several major purges failed to purify the membership sufficiently.
Both systems confronted a situation that resembled the dilemma New England Puritans faced in the mid-seventeenth century. As the devout aged, they saw the church filling with people sympathetic to the faith but who had not undergone the conversion experience that entitled them to This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:33 UTC
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church membership. The solution was the “Half Way Covenant,” which permitted the children of such people to be baptized in the hope of an eventual conversion experience. Nazism and Marxism-Leninism worried that the younger generation, blessed with the advantages won by their elders, would not be up to their calling. A Nazi writer in 1942 noted that many in Germany lacked the baptism by fire that steeled the party’s older members: “[T]hese citizens (including some party members) accept us intellectually, but in their hearts are still far from the party. Perhaps it is because they lack the great experience of struggle before our takeover. They are like heirs to whom peace, satisfaction, prosperity and happiness have been given without their having to raise a finger, without having had a single challenge to overcome.”87 How could the revolutionary experience of those who had fought for the Nazis before 1933, or for the Communists before 1945, be conveyed to those who had not been there? Could they who had not seen yet believe? National Socialism and Marxism-Leninism established enormous educational systems to train the coming generation, and both expressed confidence that the new generation would carry on the work of the old yet feared that it might not.
Both systems promised secular utopias. Although Nazism used more explicitly religious language and spoke of god, the Nazi heaven was to be realized on earth. Human problems could be resolved by will. Humanity might never be entirely perfectible, but once the Jews and the genetically defective had been eliminated and the inferior races put in their place, the Thousand Year Reich would be as close to a perfect state as was possible.
Marxism-Leninism’s vision of the Communist future for all was certainly more comprehensive than Nazism’s Aryan world, but it, too, was a curious mixture that rejected the divine while still expecting a transformation of the human character.
To get to these new worlds, it was necessary to engineer human nature.
A long process of education and changes in social conditions would produce a new type of human being. The vision of that new human being varied, but in both cases it was one type of person they wanted, devoted to the reigning ideology, loyal to the community above self, freed of the illusions of the past. Both knew this was a task of generations, not of years, and both considered steady, unrelenting propaganda to be a central tool in making citizens worthy of the state in which they would live. The problem was that the new human beings were to be formed by their old, unregen-erate parents. And it turned out to be harder to alter the human character than either system expected.
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The passion animating the conflict between National Socialism and Marxism-Leninism indicated the conflict of worldviews. The Nazis despised England and France for being decadent and subservient to the Jews yet could view the two nations as having some virtue. They were still part of the West. But Bolshevism was wholly other, a competing religion.
Goebbels discussed the matter in his diary entry for 8 May 1943: “The states based on a worldview have one advantage over the bourgeois states.
They stand on a clear spiritual foundation. This worked to our great advantage until the beginning of the campaign in the East. Then we met an opponent who also represented a worldview, even if it was a false one.”88
In occupied Luxembourg, the SS intelligence service reported that people were taking a somewhat different view of the war with Russia that still recognized it as a battle of worldviews: “the anti-Christians against the Antichrist.”89
The GDR often seemed to be refighting World War II in its struggles with West Germany. Its founding myth was antifascism, treating Germany’s loss of World War II as a victory for the better elements of the German tradition. The Berlin Wall was the “Anti-Fascist Protective Wall.” The GDR regularly presented West Germany as the direct successor to Hitler’s state.90
Why was it crucial to make the connection? It was hard to justify the GDR
as a separate state absent the threat of Nazism. In resisting West German capitalism, the GDR resisted a system doomed theoretically to collapse but which stubbornly out-produced the GDR both in quality and quantity. In claiming the anti-Fascist high ground, GDR propaganda had a way to refo-cus the argument, asserting that its vision of a Communist utopia was the way to resolve the German dilemma.
Neither system was a religion, but both used propaganda to present themselves in many of the same ways that a religion does. The majority of the faithful of any religion are not philosophers. They are interested not in thick books of theology but in the practical benefit religion provides in making sense of the world, in giving life meaning, in answering that greatest of questions: “Why?”
Milan Kundera wrote: “Totalitarianism is not only hell, but also the dream of paradise.”91 Without that dream, National Socialism and Marxism-Leninism could not have established the hold they had on the human soul.
The dream made it possible for their followers to choose to overlook evil and see illusions of good.
Their citizens did choose in many ways to turn their gaze, but it will not do to view them as somehow less morally sensitive, less human perhaps, This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:33 UTC
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than those who had the good fortune to be born in places where tempta-tions were less attractive. Hannah Arendt rightly observed that mass support for totalitarian systems was the result neither of ignorance nor brainwashing.92 The totalitarian illusions were alluring. Both systems proclaimed high goals. In their disparate ways, National Socialism and Marxism-Leninism encouraged an interest in the common good, bravery, sacrifice, neighborliness, industry, optimism, loyalty, all virtues capable of bringing much good.
Unlike Milton’s Satan who boldly asserted “Evil be thou my Good,” totalitarianism presented itself as a force for all that was right and true. It was rather easy for citizens to believe their governments were pursuing noble aims, especially since propaganda ceaselessly said so. As Cornelius Plantinga Jr. observed: “To do its worst, evil needs to look its best. Evil has to spend a lot on makeup.”93 Much of that expense went to propaganda.
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2
Doctrines
M M M M
Although National Socialism and Marxism-Leninism were quasi-religious worldviews with absolute claims to truth, they developed significantly different theoretical approaches to propaganda. Nazism was not fond of theory at all. Convoluted academic books were written on various aspects of Nazi ideology during the Third Reich, but Nazism’s leaders were not very interested in them. Although Nazism claimed to be founded on the eternal laws of nature, its leaders put their confidence more in faith and steadfast will than in scholarly elaboration, whereas Marxism-Leninism produced enormous numbers of academic treatises on every topic and expected that some would be of interest and benefit to working propagandists.
The Propagandas of Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic Page 6
