The Price of Unanimity
Both systems put enormous effort into achieving the illusion of unanimity, which was the foundation of effective propaganda. Whether in elections where 99 percent apparently voted the correct way, in the media, in the schools, or in ordinary public discourse, the goal was to impose an edifice of approved opinion. An extended passage from Václav Havel describes the result:
The manager of a fruit and vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: “Workers of the World, Unite!” Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:52 UTC
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public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moment’s thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean?
I think it can safely be assumed that the overwhelming majority of shop-keepers never think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions. That poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the enterprise headquarters along with the onions and carrots. He put them all into the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could be re-proached for not having the proper “decoration” in his window; someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life “in harmony with society,” as they say.80
Havel notes the importance of obedience, of doing the “right” thing in public, and ends with the importance of ideology, or secular faith. The greengrocer surely took the sign out of his window after Czechoslovakia’s
“Velvet Revolution” moved Havel from prison to the presidency, but even so small a step as putting a sign in a window helped to firm up his unen-thusiastic support of the state. The greengrocer may never have been a fervent Communist, but neither was he likely to join with other greengrocers to make a revolution if, as it seemed, nearly everyone else favored the way things were. His faith in the ideology was dim but present. Only when other greengrocers began removing the signs from their windows was he likely to remove the one from his.
Both systems were populated by a relatively small number of “true believers,” often those who had risked their lives fighting for a National Socialist or Communist vision, by a much larger group of lukewarm citizens who went along to get along, and by a few who were willing to express public opposition. In that sense, both Nazism and Marxism-Leninism were successful in their persuasive goals. But both knew their support was frag-ile. Nazism enjoyed more genuine popularity than the GDR, but despite Goebbels’s campaigns against grumblers and complaining, an enormous amount of it went on, and once the mixture of propaganda and force vanished in 1945 Germans rapidly relinquished “eternal National Socialist values” in favor of what came next—parliamentary democracy in the West, Marxism-Leninism in the East. The citizens of the GDR, who had the mis-fortune to lose the war “twice,” found themselves with a new and imposed secular faith. By 1970 or so they had adjusted to it, but its shallow hold was revealed in 1989 when, to the surprise of many intellectuals who still This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:52 UTC
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Public and Private Life
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saw in the vision of socialism hope for the future, the bulk of the nation’s citizenry made it clear that they had no wish to carry on the facade any longer. Just as a religion fails in its goals when it wins outward compliance but not inner conviction, a system of enforced unanimity may seem to rest on broad support but in the end finds it rests only on force.
Summary
Both the National Socialist and GDR systems extended propaganda to every area of public life. Through a comprehensive system of measures using both the carrot and the stick, spines gradually bent. It does not take fear of prison or other catastrophic sanctions to bend spines. In Havel’s words from 1975: “[I]t is not the absolute value of a threat which counts, so much as its relative value. It is not so much what someone objectively loses, as the subjective importance it has for him on the plane on which he lives, with its own scale of values. . . . Everyone has something to lose and so everyone has reason to be afraid.”81 Attitudes generally do not change instantly, rather step by step. One step makes the next easier, and it is hard to turn back. Each time a person gives in to the pressure, each time one’s spine bends a little more, the next step becomes easier. It is uncomfortable psychologically to admit what is happening, so people in general do not.
The Holocaust could not have occurred in 1933. The Nazis themselves were not ready for it. But after eight years of relentless propaganda and energetic state measures, few were ready to stand by the Jews. I disagree with Daniel Goldhagen’s argument that Germany was filled with willing execu-tioners, but surely most Germans did not care much for the Jews and were willing to ignore the signs of barbarism plain to those who wished to see.82
Only when things happened suddenly were they jolted to awareness and then only for a little while.
The GDR was spared the worst excesses of Marxism-Leninism, which after all is responsible for the deaths of as many as 100 million people over its not-yet-finished existence.83 Had the Soviets decided to march west, however, who doubts that the GDR would have joined in? Spines bent over the years in ways small and large. Christians in the GDR fought the introduction of the Jugendweihe in the 1950s. By 1980 most Christian parents allowed their children to participate. Citizens grew used to holding their tongues and doing the expected things.
Each step of submission was one-way, difficult to reverse. As propaganda molded behavior, attitudes followed. Jesus said that those who can This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:52 UTC
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be trusted in small things can be trusted in great things (Luke 16:10), but the converse is also true. Those who bend on small things will bend in time on larger ones. By the late war years, many Germans had the uneasy feeling that the war had to be won because, as morale reports noted, they knew that dreadful things had happened in the East and feared Jewish revenge. Once they had had moral qualms. Now they feared revenge. Citizens of the GDR had nothing as horrifying to fear, but they, too, had grown used to “living the lie,” and behaviors that once grated had become taken for granted. Neither system successfully won the full loyalty of its citizens—
but both established a sufficient degree of public uniformity through a combination of propaganda and force to make citizens behave as if they had.
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8
The Failure of Propaganda
M M M M
The propagandas of the Third Reich and the GDR failed. Both had as their goal better and lasting worlds populated by new kinds of human beings. The Third Reich survived twelve years, the GDR forty. Both collapsed absolutely, the Third Reich by military force, the GDR through a gradual decline that became suddenly evident when its citizens realized their leaders were no longer prepared to maintain their rule by the bullet.
Neither system, despite talk of eternal values and scientific laws, produced adherents who were eager to restore them after they were gone. Nazism’s latter-day followers are ordinarily unpleasant crackpots. The GDR’s remaining proponents hope not for a return to the days of Honecker but to a revival of the original vision of socialism. Why did su
ch enormous efforts to sway human attitudes have so little permanent effect? Let me begin by reviewing where and why the systems succeeded before turning to their ultimate failures.
Success
The primary success came in establishing the illusion, both at home and abroad, that National Socialism and Marxism-Leninism had a depth of 155
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support greater than they in fact had. Those who visited Nazi Germany in the 1930s returned with the impression of a country in which the vast majority of the population, if perhaps not 99 percent, supported the Führer.
The Nuremberg rallies were persuasive spectacles both for participants and observers, as were the mass meetings and mass organizations. Germans themselves had difficulty determining how deep Hitler’s support was. People knew their own attitudes and those of their close friends and family.
Everyone knew that sensible souls were unlikely to express hostile views in public, but the appearance of unanimity that resulted from multiple pressures was persuasive.
The almost uniform mass media of the GDR, the well-organized mass gatherings, and the hulking apparatus of party and state presented a facade of a smoothly functioning system. There seemed little reason to believe that such an outwardly solid system was built on shifting sand. The GDR’s sudden disappearance startled everyone, including scholars who predicted stability for the GDR even as it was collapsing.1 The Stasi thought its state secure since there were only a handful of passionate dissidents. When visiting the GDR in 1988 and 1989, I told acquaintances that the GDR would have to make major changes within ten years. They replied that I was an American optimist and that it would take at least fifty years. We were both wrong by significant, if differing, margins.
In state religions, citizens generally at least go through the motions, making it difficult to be sure who believes and who does not. The same is true in political religions. Some citizens passionately believed in National Socialism or Marxism-Leninism. Both systems explained the world as it was and promised a better world to come. Many of the most dedicated believers had fought for their systems when they unpopular, often at personal cost. They had risked death and injury, endured scorn, lived in exile.
Misguided they were, but many believed themselves fighting for noble causes.
Once their systems gained power, they were in an awkward rhetorical situation. Like Christians after the emperor Constantine’s conversion, their once despised cause now controlled the state. Realizing their goals proved challenging. It is easier to attack than to build. Having sacrificed much, it was difficult to surrender belief; the pressures to keep believing were great. As Milovan Djilas wrote in the 1950s: “The world has seen few heroes as ready to sacrifice and suffer as the Communists were on the eve of and during the revolution. It has probably never seen such charac-terless wretches and stupid defenders of arid formulas as they became This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:59 UTC
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after attaining power.”2 Some dedicated to Hitler’s cause before 1933 were not much different.
For the true believers, propaganda reinforced their beliefs. Since they accepted its premises, they were forgiving of its faults and eager to believe its claims. Having given much to win victory, admitting that they had fought for a dubious cause would have resulted in considerable dissonance.
They wanted to believe, and propaganda gave them reason in full measure.
Nazism or Marxism-Leninism became their de facto religion, the party group their congregation.
But true believers were the minority. The far greater percentage of the population was less committed. Hitler’s best showing in a free election was 37 percent of the popular vote, and most of them were not true believers.
Socialism came to the GDR with Russian troops and probably could never have won a majority in a free election. Propaganda was a critical element in maintaining the support of half-hearted believers.
Both systems, after all, claimed great goals. Few people supported Hitler in the hopes that he would bring world war or kill millions of Jews, nor did Nazi propaganda claim that he would. Rather, Hitler spoke of peace, national recovery, morality, even God. As Alan Bullock observed: “No man ever spoke with greater feeling of the horror and stupidity of war than Adolf Hitler.”3 He provided successes that a considerable majority of the German population welcomed: great reductions in unemployment, remili-tarization, territorial conquest, a general brightening of mood. Marxism-Leninism did not win supporters by proposing a rigid bureaucracy, a ruined economy, and the Berlin Wall. Instead, it promised an egalitarian society free of exploitation, war, and misery. Its ability to provide social services and a dependable standard of living earned respect. Both systems took power from predecessors that had failed. After the great disaster of the Depression and the even greater disaster of World War II, Germans were willing to hope that a new system could at least make things better. It was hard to imagine them getting worse.
The evil of these two systems was both evident and hard to see at the same time. The great goals gave hope, the unpleasant elements could be ignored or explained away. When Germans claimed that they had known nothing about the Holocaust, they were engaging in a mixture of truth and self-deception. The evidence had been there, but most had not wanted to see it. J.P. Stern put it this way: “The people of the Reich, it seems, knew as much (for example about the killing of their German fellow citizens) or as little (for example about the killing of their Jewish fellow citizens) as they This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:59 UTC
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wanted to know. What they did not know, they did not want to know, for obvious reasons. But not wanting to know always means knowing enough to know that one doesn’t want to know more.”4 There were reasons not to see what was unpleasant. Cowardice is one reason, but so is ordinary human nature. Few even in open societies go out of their way to encounter that which is unpleasant.
For those whose faith wavered, propaganda provided plausible reasons to believe. Reasons are important, even if they are not particularly good reasons. Ellen Langer’s classic study had people ask to break into a line at a photocopy machine. Sixty percent of those who asked to break in without giving a reason succeeded. Ninety-four percent of those who gave a good reason (“I’m late for class”) succeeded. A startling 93 percent of those who gave a poor reason (“Excuse me, may I use the Xerox machine, because I have to make some copies?”) succeeded.5 What was important was not the quality of the reason, rather that there was one. In a larger sense, propaganda also provided reasons, if often poor ones. World War II began, Germans were told, because the Western allies were trying to encircle Germany and because Poland attacked a German radio station. The Berlin Wall was built to keep Western fascists from destroying the GDR. These arguments were supported by a mass of evidence. Though the evidence was sometimes of poor quality, finding solid contrary evidence was usually difficult.
In opposing the system, one seemed to be opposing the vision of a better future. One could accept the inadequacies of the present in the hope of what would come. A frequent comment in Nazi Germany was: “If only the Führer knew.” Hitler, despite his almost superhuman abilities, could not be expected to know everything. Such comments permitted people to view evil as peripheral to the system. Hans-Dieter Schütt, editor of Junge Welt, said after 1989: “My relationship with socialism was like that with a coat that one has buttoned wrongly from the first, but notices only with the last button. Still, the coat keeps one warm.”6 Another writer compared the view of many GDR intellectuals toward their state with that of parents toward a child wi
th a disability: “a desperate, self-torturing love aware of the defect, hoping for improvement and filled with defensive rage when outsiders mention the problem.”7
Moreover, propaganda presented facades of overwhelming public acceptance. The media, the arts, the schools, everyday activities—all suggested that nearly everyone else was in general sympathy with the state.
Not only did such unanimity discourage actively hostile opinion and This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:59 UTC
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encourage ostentatiously approved behavior, the pressure it produced to conform led citizens gradually to shift their internal opinions to be consistent with their public behavior. One cannot say “Heil Hitler” a dozen times a day without being affected. Even in a democratic state repetition works, as advertisers know when they build frequency into their campaigns.
It was further impossible to live a normal life without regularly bending to the party. A socialist observer within Germany thought in 1937 that the Nazis had given up trying to persuade every citizen. Instead, their system was so extensive that “no one can get anything done in Germany without depending on some National Socialist organization.”8 Little happened in the GDR without some involvement or support from the party. To live a relatively normal life, people simply had to bow to the system, to say and do what was expected of them.
And the consequences of public disbelief were unpleasant. Life became more difficult. One’s career—or worse, the future of one’s children—could be damaged by opposing the massive structures of society. As Havel observes: “Most people are loath to spend their days in ceaseless conflict with authority, especially when it can only end in the defeat of the isolated individual. So why not do what is required of you? It costs nothing, and in time you cease to bother about it.”9 Both systems wanted to be taken for granted, to be seen as a realities that had to be accepted. One may not like a thunderstorm but still takes out the umbrella.
The Propagandas of Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic Page 22
