The mental processes are not unique to those living under totalitarian states. Pressures to conform are strong in any society. Timur Kuran’s work on preference falsification argues that apparent public consensus encourages people to overdo their public performances as a way of demonstrating that they “really” believe.10 Ellul argues: “The aim of modern propaganda is no longer to modify ideas, but to provoke action.”11 Actions change attitudes at least as much as attitudes change actions. Propaganda builds habits of belief and expression. Both Nazism and Marxism-Leninism worked mightily to get people to vote, to join the expected organizations, to say the right things, to avoid behaviors that might prove troublesome.
The sanctions for violating norms have power. GDR journalists later spoke of “the scissors in the head,” or self-censorship. Authors noted that censorship stopped some books from being published, but self-censorship prevented even more from being written at all. Again, this is not limited to totalitarian states. A survey of American journalists published in 2000
found that a quarter of them had avoided newsworthy stories because they anticipated professional difficulties.12 Whatever the merits of the brouhaha This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:59 UTC
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over “political correctness” in the United States, there is scarcely doubt that even in open societies many factors conjoin in ways leading to spirals of silence or prudence.
Looking around at the unrelenting propaganda surrounding them, it is not surprising that most citizens of National Socialist Germany or the GDR
chose to live as peacefully as possible. Moreover, since to most of them politics was not as central as their leaders wanted it to be, the compromises that gradually bent their spines were relatively easy to make. A common rationalization in both systems was to believe that if one were not doing a particular job, he or she would likely be replaced by a hard-liner. Going part of the way prevented someone else from going all of the way. But going part of the way today makes it easier to go all the way tomorrow.
Both systems called for absolute commitment but settled for citizens who caused no trouble and made at least some public signs of holding the right attitudes and doing the right things. As long as the twin pillars of propaganda and force held, the Potemkin villages stood.
Failure
In a deeper sense, both propagandas failed catastrophically. Both claimed to tell the truth; neither was credible. Both demanded enthusiastic support but settled for public compliance. Both spoke of eternal values; neither had them. Both caused more misery than joy. Their failures are at root the same. Both asked propaganda to do more than it can do.
One must begin by remembering that both systems failed primarily for reasons that had little to do with propaganda. Despite the claims of Nazi propaganda, human will was not sufficient to overcome the overwhelming enemy advantage in men and matériel. Hitler’s Reich collapsed under military force that no amount of propaganda could have withstood. The GDR
imploded because the Soviet Union was no longer willing to support it militarily and because of its desolate economic condition. The best propaganda can only go so far in persuading people to ignore the evidence of their senses, particularly when Goebbels’s sharp sword no longer is behind it.
Totalitarian propaganda fails for inherent reasons that over the long term (which may be generations) make it unable to achieve the goals its makers set. It fails because it is untruthful, because it encourages hypocrisy, and because it is in the biblical sense idolatrous, placing a human absolute in place of a divine absolute. The last is the worst. With This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:59 UTC
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the conviction that the Führer or the party is infallible, the way to evil is open.
Total claims to truth make propaganda deceitful. National Socialists and Marxist-Leninists ignored facts that were sometimes obvious. For systems that claim truth, reality is inconvenient. Things don’t turn out the way the theory predicts they should. As Havel observes: “Reality does not shape theory, but rather the reverse. Thus power gradually draws closer to ideology than it does to reality; it draws its strength from theory and becomes entirely dependent on it.”13 Propaganda is forced into a shifting relationship with the world as it is. Since one cannot admit error, reality bends like spines to the requirements of ideology. A classic case for the Nazis was the German-Soviet pact of August 1939 that freed Germany to begin the war.
It eliminated the prospect of a two-front war until Hitler thought he was ready for it two years later, but it was in ugly contradiction to everything the Nazis had said for years. The system was at a loss to explain it even to its propagandists.14 Joseph Stalin, the great friend of the German people, became an unperson after his death. Observant GDR citizens noticed.
News determined by propaganda undermined confidence in the system.
Ellul notes that propaganda needs to be consonant with the facts: it “cannot prevail against facts that are too massive and definite.”15 Goebbels recognized that news could not disagree with people’s direct experiences, ordering, for example, that reports of bombing damage should be accurate in the affected area: “It is nonsense to distort facts which have taken place in front of everybody’s eyes.”16 However, any observant citizen knew that the news was manipulated. As a 1942 SD report observed: “Citizens have the feeling that the public media always provide the ‘official view’ of negative events. The result is that wide circles of the public no longer see the press as the best source of information.”17
People in these systems lived with the knowledge that news was not reliable, that the government would say what it needed to say to reach its ends. In 1965, as a draft of the forthcoming Argument der Woche (a pamphlet sent to agitators) dealing with Western television was being circulated around the Agitation Department for criticism, one staff member suggested: “I think the argument that opinion surveys have found that 75% don’t believe Western television is a bad one. Would that it were so!”18
Private disbelief had little direct impact on day-to-day life and could be more or less ignored, but it also left a nagging knowledge that there was a discrepancy between ideals and reality. Both citizens and leaders were engaged in public hypocrisy. The government told citizens things that were This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:59 UTC
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not true, and that citizens often knew to be untrue, but required them to behave in public as if they were true.
That was not in itself a critical problem. Even if citizens were not sure, they could not personally check out every story and every fact. The vast majority of the news in both systems had at least some basis in fact. More than that, the news set the agenda for public opinion. Citizens who read about the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 knew that Ernst Röhm was no longer a great hero of the movement and adopted their public statements accordingly. Citizens who read reports that people throughout the GDR
welcomed the building of the Wall might not share those sentiments, but they knew what they should say to avoid difficulties. And people’s daily lives were of more direct interest to them than the secondhand events reported by the press and broadcast media.
The larger problem was that propaganda could give neither system what it craved: a citizenry of one mind and one spirit. Instead, it promoted hypocrisy. A 1935 report from the Münster area noted that public enthusiasm was low. The signs were subtle: “Since people fear legal consequences, their true feelings seldom are expressed in public. But their true opinions are evident in the obvious passivity of the population with regards to the movement’s meetings.”19 There are many similar comments in the files.
knew that many who joined the mass organizations and said the expected things in public were not strong supporters. Leaders had to act in public as if they believed they had mass support, knowing that the support was shallower than they wished.
One way to see the problem is to recall Hitler’s distinction between the members and followers of a political movement. The members were passionate, willing to risk all, true believers. The followers were those who voted for a party or made modest sacrifices in its cause but for whom it was not of life-forming significance. This is a useful distinction for a revolutionary movement, but when the movement gains power and insists that all share the passion of the few, difficulties inevitably come. It is no longer easy to tell the two groups apart. A citizen does not “suffer” for being a Nazi or a Communist. Now a citizen suffers for not being one. It becomes difficult to tell who really believes and who does not.
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One cannot compel long-term passionate belief. It is relatively easy to make people act as if they believe. Most people will adjust outwardly to prevailing opinion. For a state that wants peace and order, that may be sufficient, but not for worldviews, whether religious or political. Both National Socialism and Marxism-Leninism produced citizens who merely went through the motions. People pretended to believe, and governments pretended to believe that people believed.
Internal GDR reports make the point. Shortly after the building of the Wall, a report on the medical profession noted that physicians were saying:
“Particularly after 13.8. [1961], it is not good to say anything. It is best to say nothing. One does not always have the proper opinion, after all.”20 A summary of discussions with journalists two years later found that they were leery of any kind of criticism, particularly of functionaries: “It is best to keep away from it, since then at least nothing can happen to one.”21
One Soviet citizen told a Western journalist that he had six faces: “one for my wife; one, less candid, for my children, just in case they blurted out things heard at home; one for close friends; one for acquaintances; one for colleagues at work; and one for public display.”22 Citizens of the Third Reich and the GDR could say the same.
The majority of citizens in both states did not actively resist the propaganda they encountered. Much of it they even accepted, at least on a superficial level. A considerable majority of the citizens of Hitler’s Reich would have voted for him even in a free election by 1938. At least a significant minority of the GDR’s citizens favored the vision of socialism. But the roots were shallow. Most held the “right” views because such views were safe and easy and because they were outwardly plausible. Yet there was unease in the corners of their minds.
A 1984 report of the Institute for Youth Research in Leipzig found that 80 percent of the GDR’s youth listened to or watched West German media.
This had clear consequences on their attitude toward the GDR: “A central finding of previous research is the strong relationship between high con-sumption of Western media and lower political consciousness, lower societal activity, a lower significance of socialist values for one’s life orientation, and so on.”23 These were still young people who were members of the FDJ, who served in the army, who joined the right organizations when they matured. They adapted to what was expected of them. Günter Gaus’s classic description of the GDR as a “niche society” speaks to the same point.
People found corners where they could do as they wished, relatively free of party or state coercion.24 This, of course, contradicted the GDR’s claim that This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:59 UTC
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there was no corner of life that was not political. Whereas religions tend to integrate belief and action, totalitarian systems tend to disintegrate people’s thoughts and actions, no matter how much propaganda is poured into them.
Horst Sindermann, then head of the SED’s Agitation Department, speaking to a propaganda conference in 1959, said clearly what was true for the entire history of the GDR: “Discussions with citizens clearly prove how unclear citizens still are even about the central questions of our policies.”25 In SED jargon, that meant disagreement. A report from the GDR’s Academy of Sciences in the last months noted: “[T]he conviction that our era is characterized above all by the transition from capitalism to socialism has clearly weakened. A growing number of workers no longer accepts automatically our view that socialism is the historically necessary and socially desirable alternative to capitalism.”26 These are reports of what a church writer might call a “spiritual vacuum.” The core beliefs of the system were evaporating.
Strong forces joined to keep those of little faith holding on to their little faith. Testifying to the Enquete Commission, Wolfgang Schuller outlined the fundamental repressive principles of the GDR system, principles that apply as well to the Third Reich:
• A broad, impenetrable and comprehensive network of measures that hindered any opposition;
• A “Mafia Principle,” by which he means that both systems forced citizens to bend to their wills, to collaborate to a greater or lesser degree, to accomplish even life’s ordinary purposes;
• An environment that seemed fixed and immovable;
The result of these principles was “a feeling of weakness, a feeling of subordination, a feeling of being at someone else’s mercy, and, perhaps a little overstated, a feeling of anxiety, and that by intention.”27
Although repression succeeded in keeping most people quiet, it did not make them true believers, only nervous ones. The fundamental problem is that the freedom to disbelieve is essential if one is to believe.28 Both systems demanded belief, and made it unpleasant to disbelieve, at least outwardly. Citizens knew why they were doing what they were doing in public, and felt no pressure to internalize the demands of the system, to make them their own.
Not only ordinary citizens faced a dilemma between their private and public lives. Party members and functionaries were in a treacherous This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:59 UTC
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position. On the one hand, they were devoting their lives to a cause some thought had high and noble goals, or what at least could be thought to be such. On the other hand, they could see the failings of their system as clearly as anyone else yet were less free to admit it. With the decline in ideological fervor, the leadership’s nature changed. Havel’s 1987 description of Czechoslovakia also applies to the GDR: “We are no longer governed by fanatics, revolutionaries, or ideological zealots. The country is administered by faceless bureaucrats who profess adherence to a revolutionary ideology, but look out only for themselves, and no longer believe in anything.”29
The GDR produced a huge corps of functionaries who were “professional believers.” Their livelihoods depended on saying and doing the right things. In the words of Jesus, many were “whited sepulchres,” presenting a facade that concealed hypocrisy.
This situation had a critical role in the GDR’s ultimate collapse. Lenin, Stalin, or even Ulbricht would not have stood by as the GDR disintegrated in 1989. They would have used state force. Earlier approaches to totalitarianism observed this clearly. Friedrich and Brzezinski’s classic 1965 Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, for example, claimed: “The [totalitarian]<
br />
system, because of the alleged ideological infallibility of its dogma, is continually tempted to increase terror by a violent passion for assent, for unanimity.”30 Jeane Kirkpatrick’s Dictatorships and Double Standards made a similar argument in 1982.31 The argument was reasonable, since in fact there were as yet no examples of totalitarian states fading away like Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat. The argument, however, assumed that new leaders of totalitarian states would maintain the same willingness to hold to power whatever the cost. This did not turn out to be true. When it came time to shoot, second- or third-generation Communist leaders across Europe who had lost the passion of the founders flinched. Their own faith in the systems was too weak to justify killing.
Nazism’s leaders did not have sufficient time to reach such a state, though later generations of leaders would have lacked the passion of the first. Nonetheless, large numbers of bureaucrats and functionaries who adjusted to the advent of the new system did lack the revolutionary fervor Nazism demanded. This was a source of steady distress to the leadership.
Ironically, propaganda deceived its own leadership, eager to believe what it wished to believe. Besides, the systems were usually good to those who kept them functioning. Albert Speer surrounded the evening gathering of Nazi leaders during the Nuremberg rallies with the spectacular
“dome of light,” with scores of searchlights pointing upward, in part to This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:59 UTC
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conceal the growing paunches. Speer, a remarkable and able man, served the system with a passion that provided him with opportunity for a life-time of reflection after 1945. Although the SED leadership suburb of Wandlitz did not rival the palaces of Nazi leaders, it was a pleasanter place to live than an apartment in a high-rise housing development.
The Propagandas of Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic Page 23
