The masses seemed to appreciate their leaders. Such support is satisfying. As Timothy Garton Ash observed, “the element of simple vanity should never be underrated in explaining the conduct of men and women in power.”32 Speer reported driving through a series of villages with Hitler.
As word passed from one village to the next, the waiting crowds grew.
Hitler remarked: “Heretofore only one German has been hailed like this: Luther. When he rode through the country, people gathered from far and wide to cheer him. As they do for me today!”33 Erich Honecker, inter-viewed after the collapse of his state, simply could not understand what had happened. “My fall as chief of party and state was the result of a vast plot, the organizers of which are still hiding in the background,” he said, utterly missing the fact that it was brought on by a massively disaffected citizenry.34 A well-regulated system kept him supplied with good news and happy workers. He saw few signs of impending doom, at least few signs that he chose to see.
One reason there were few signs is that subordinates knew that forthrightness was not a good career move. Hitler told his followers that no one should complain to him about poor morale. It was their responsibility to produce good morale.35 As a result, sanitized reports were passed up the line. Even those at the lower level who were relatively direct in their reports had their words toned down by their superiors.36 Mary Fulbrook found the same phenomenon in the GDR: “Reports from the provinces were increasingly bland depictions of alleged popular support for the regime and its ruler; and those, such as Hans Modrow, First Secretary of Dresden, who sought to draw Honecker’s attention to the social realities which lay below the mounting discontent, were disciplined for their pains.”37 The standard report from SED district first secretaries to Berlin began with a litany of successes, with cautious mention of real problems that might be solved with some extra resources toward the end. This, too, promoted internal hypocrisy. Leaders knew they were bending their spines to please their superiors. There was no space for critics and hence for truth.
Sycophants replace prophets when leaders believe too strongly in their own greatness.
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The Failure of Propaganda
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The same was true across public life. People grew used to what Eastern Europeans called “living the lie” or “breathing underwater.” Such behavior can lead to relatively stable societies for a time, but it does not produce what both Nazism and the GDR wanted: new Nazi or socialist men and women committed passionately to a coming utopia. Instead, they got citizens who cheered on command, who said the right things in public, who even believed some or much of what propaganda told them, but superficially rather than deeply. They were like adherents to a state religion who do not quite disbelieve.
New societies are not built by people who do not disbelieve but by those with passion and a willingness to sacrifice. Both Nazism and socialism had such followers before they gained power. They may not have been the best, but, in Auden’s words, they were filled with “passionate intensity.”
Nazism did not outlive its founders, but after forty-five years of Marxism, most GDR leaders were of the second or third generation. Some still had passion, but many were themselves half-hearted believers with a personal interest in the continuation of the system. They grew less willing to shoot their fellow citizens to defend the system.
National Socialism had a stronger base of support than Marxism-Leninism, but it faded quickly from Germany after 1945. It took courage to march in Leipzig on 9 October 1989, the night the East German revolution began. It was not at all clear that the GDR’s leaders had lost the willingness to back propaganda with force. Once they failed to use power to stop that massive display of public dissatisfaction, the system crumbled within weeks. Those with less courage joined those with more until even those with no courage at all joined the throng.
The pressure for unanimity corrupted the systems. Too many people said too many things they did not believe too many times. Few raised in public problems that nearly all privately saw. That does not mean there was no disagreement. Hitler’s henchmen and his generals could disagree with him—and sometimes persuade him. The GDR’s citizens in private conversations (even at party meetings) spoke of the cracks in the system.
But there was no public forum for significant criticism in either system.
Propaganda and force saw to that. As Ellul claims: “Propaganda ceases where simple dialogue begins.”38 And evil begins where simple dialogue ends.
“The only person who likes change is a wet baby,” as a recent phrase puts it. Without voices urging change, little changes. The Nazi system could not respond effectively to challenges that required more than order and This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:59 UTC
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Chapter Eight
obedience to resolve. It is interesting that some of its greatest successes came in areas where relative openness prevailed (for example, Albert Speer’s ministry). The GDR’s command economy functioned in jerks and starts. At the end of the GDR, Honecker was boasting of the enormous resources that had been sunk into producing a one megabyte computer chip that was outdated as he spoke. Meanwhile, the GDR’s factories, despite talk of being the world’s tenth leading industrial nation, had no hope of being competitive once the protections of the closed system vanished after 1989.
But worse than one-sided newspapers, economic failure, and corroded personalities, the propagandas of both systems called evil good and good evil, and few had the courage to say nay. The scale of evil perpetrated by German National Socialism dwarfs that caused by the GDR, but the GDR
was part of a larger system that killed as many as 100 million people. The controversy occasioned by The Black Book of Communism is interesting evidence that, for some, the victims of Marxism-Leninism are more “acceptable” than the victims of National Socialism, that their deaths somehow are not as evil since, to their minds, Marxism-Leninism was pursuing noble goals; but it pursued those goals using many of the same methods as its competing worldview.39
Claiming to have the truth, each system was incapable of repairing the evil it produced. In the conviction that they could mold a new and uniform type of human being, they destroyed existing human beings. Pope John Paul II’s 1993 encyclical letter Veritatis Splendor made the point precisely:
“[T]he root of modern totalitarianism is to be found in the denial of the transcendent dignity of the human person who, as the visible image of the invisible God, is therefore by his very nature the subject of rights which no one may violate—no individual, group, class, nation or state.” 40 Both systems evaluated individual human beings not as uniquely and inherently valuable, rather by their usefulness to the reigning creed. By failing to af-firm both the mystery and intrinsic value of human life, they failed as substitute religions. In bending spines, the totalitarian systems misunderstood human nature and brought out the worst of old human beings rather than the best of new ones.
No one who attended the last Nuremberg rally in 1938 expected that the whole structure of National Socialism would vanish within seven years. When visiting Leipzig in July 1988, I was surprised by the energy with which people criticized the system to me in private conversation.
Surely, I thought, I was only encountering those with enough courage to This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:59 UTC
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The Failure of Propaganda
169
invite an American to dinner. They could not be typical of the population.
I was not alone in my defective analysis.
Under both National Socialism and Marxism-Leninism, propaganda was powerful and persuasive. Spines bent. Ordinary human beings sometimes acted in ways that ranged fr
om unpleasant to dreadful. Yet no matter how hard the dictatorships tried and how long they worked, it was not possible to produce nations of citizens committed passionately and unanimously to the reigning creed—a creed that at its core was rotten. Just as religions have found that forced adherence is shallow, the great dictatorships of the twentieth century, for all their sound and fury, failed to create new human beings capable of building a secular millennium. To use a biblical metaphor, they built houses upon sand that could not resist the storm.
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Notes
Introduction
1. Cited by Victoria Barnett, For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest Against Hitler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 60.
2. Johannes R. Becher, “Gebranntes Kind,” Sinn und Form 42 (2000): 343.
3. Cited by Stefan Wolle, Die heile Welt der Diktatur: Alltag und Herrschaft in der DDR, 1971–1989, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Ch. Links, 1998), 14.
4. Cited by Günter Heydemann and Christopher Beckmann, “Zwei Diktaturen in Deutschland: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen des historischen Diktaturvergleichs,” Deutschland Archiv 30 (1997): 2.
5. For an interesting attempt to clarify the term, see Stanley B. Cunningham, The Idea of Propaganda: A Reconstruction (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002).
6. Friedrich Schönemann, Die Kunst der Massenbeeinflussung in den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1924), 9.
7. Myers Collection, University of Michigan Library, Kreisleitung Eisenach/56: Propaganda-Parole Nr. 7, 1942, 9.
8. Even Joseph Goebbels spoke of enemy propaganda in a June 1942
essay in which he argued that the only explanation for the fact that the Allied nations were still fighting was that “their powers of judgment have been blinded by unscrupulous and lying propaganda.” See Joseph Goebbels, Das eherne Herz: Reden und Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1941/42 (Munich: Franz Eher, 1943), 344.
9. Kleines politisches Wörterbuch, 7th ed. (Berlin: Dietz, 1988), 795. For the full definitions, see the German Propaganda Archive (GPA): http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/kpwb.htm. Future references to the GPA will take this form: GPA/title.htm.
10. Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, trans. Konrad Kellen and Jean Lerner (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), 61.
11. Ibid., 121.
12. Hitler was unhappy with the Peace of Westphalia for a variety of reasons and proposed to abolish it, although that would hardly have had 171
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Notes to pages 5–8
any practical consequences. See Elke Fröhlich, ed., Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels (Munich: K. G. Sauer, 1997–2001), 7:33.
13. For an extended analysis of evildoers with good consciences in the context of the GDR, see Lothar Fritze, Täter mit gutem Gewissen: Über menschliches Versagen im diktatorischen Sozialismus (Cologne: Böhlau, 1998).
14. Kenneth Burke, “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle,’” in The Philosophy of Literary Form (New York: Vintage, 1957), 188.
15. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 379–380.
16. Ibid., 267.
17. Joseph Goebbels, Signale der neuen Zeit: 25 ausgewählte Reden, 5th ed.
(Munich: Franz Eher, 1938), 44–45.
18. Materialien der Enquete-Kommission “Aufarbeitung von Geschichte und Folgen der SED-Diktatur in Deutschland” (12. Wahlperiode des Deutschen Bundestages). vol. 3, book 2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995), p. 1416.
19. Hans-Joachim Maaz, Behind the Wall: The Inner Life of Communist Germany, trans. Margot Bettauer Dembo (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 2–3.
20. Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (New York: Octagon Books, 1981), xiii.
21. Materialien der Enquete-Kommission, vol. 3, bk. 3, p. 2077.
22. Erich Voegelin, Political Religions, trans. T. J. DeNapoli and E. S. Easterly III (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1986), 59.
23. For two quite different examples, see Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), and Aryeh Unger, The Totalitarian Party: Party and People in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974).
24. A British acquaintance tells of attending a conference on East Germany in the 1980s where leading scholar David Childs gave a critical account of conditions in the GDR, including the system’s inability to meet consumer expectations. He mentioned shortages of vegetables as an example. The audience of academics, predominately sympathetic with the GDR project, responded with vigor. One professor rose, shak-ing with anger, to say: “I did not come to this conference to hear anec-dotes about vegetables!” But the GDR’s inability to provide consumers with what they wanted was, of course, a major reason for its collapse.
25. Michael Ruck, Bibliogaphie zum Nationalsozialismus, 2nd ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2000).
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Notes to pages 8–12
173
26. A bibliography published in 2000 listed 5,800 books published between 1990 and 2000. See Hendrick Berth and Elmar Brähler, Zehn Jahre Deutsche Einheit: Die Bibliographie (Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Forschung, 2000). The associated on-line database listed 46,000
items in December 2003, although many items in the bibliography and database concern what happened after 1989. See http://www.
wiedervereinigung.de/.
27. Having asked people to write to me, I could hardly ignore their letters, but neither was I capable of corresponding with that many people. I therefore responded to the first 1,800 of them with a lengthy form letter in June 1989. I made the letter as innocuous as possible, since I knew that such a mass of letters arriving from the United States would attract the interest of the State Security officers that inspected incoming international mail. I expected either that all of the letters would be blocked or none. As it turned out, there were ten regional postal districts in the GDR. Four of them delivered the letters. The other six districts delivered none of them.
Chapter 1
1. Schriftsteller Verband der DDR, X. Schriftstellerkongreß der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik: Arbeitsgruppen. (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1988), 24.
2. Fröhlich, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, 7:293.
3. See Hans Maier, ed., “Totalitarismus” und “politische Religionen”: Konzepte des Diktaturvergleichs, 2 vols., (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1996); Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000); and Claus-Ekkehard Bärsch, Die politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus: Die religiöse Dimension der NS-Ideologie in den Schriften von Dietrich Eckardt, Joseph Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg und Adolf Hitler (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1998). Earlier studies of Nazi political religion include Hans-Jochen Gamm, Der braune Kult: Das Dritte Reich und seine Ersatzreligion: Ein Beitrag zur politischen Bildung (Hamburg: Rütten & Loening, 1962) and Klaus Vondung, Magie und Manipulation: Ideologischer Kult und politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971).
4. For a good general history of the term, see Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). For a good review of the applicability of the term This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:35:43 UTC
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174
Notes to pages 12–16
“totalitarian” to the GDR, see Corey
Ross, The East German Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of the GDR (London: Arnold, 2002), 19–43. He finds the term substantially less useful than I do.
5. This follows the standard classic definitions of totalitarianism and is a slightly altered version of that proposed by Norbert Kapferer, Der Totalitarismusbegriff auf dem Prüfstand (Dresden: Hannah-Arendt-Institut für Totalitarismusforschung, 1995).
6. Otto Zander, ed., Weimar: Bekenntnis und Tat: Kulturpolitisches Arbeitslager der Reichsjugendführung, 1938 (Berlin: Wilhelm Limpert, 1938), 63.
7. Wolfgang Schultz, “Auch an seinem Heim erkennt man den National-sozialisten!” Der Hoheitsträger 3, no. 8 (1939): 17.
8. Kleines politisches Wörterbuch (1988), 1077–1079.
9. Heinrich Gemkow, ed., Der Sozialismus—Deine Welt (Berlin: Neues Leben, 1975), 477.
10. A. Hempel, “Zuviel Politik,” Trommel, 18/1980, 1.
11. Landesarchiv Berlin, BPA/SED IV—2/9.01/894, Wochenbericht (5.2.1958), 2.
12. Hermann Göring, untitled editorial, Sommerlager- und Heimabendmaterial für die Schulungs- und Kulturarbeit, summer 1941, 2.
13. See GPA/posters/hitler1.jpg.
14. Gunter d’Alquen, Das ist der Sieg! Briefe des Glaubens in Aufbruch und Krieg (Berlin: Franz Eher, 1941), 42. See GPA/sieg.htm.
15. Baldur von Schirach, ed., Das Lied der Getreuen: Verse ungennanter öster-reichischer Hitler-Jugend aus den Jahren der Verfolgung, 1933–37 (Leipzig: Philipp Reclam jun., 1938), 12. For more examples, see GPA/hit-poet.htm. A similar book with a wider range of authors is Karl Hans Bühner, ed., Dem Führer: Gedichte für Adolf Hitler (Stuttgart: Georg Truckenmüller, 1939).
16. Helmut Heiber, Goebbels Reden, 1932–1945, 2 vols. (Munich: Wilhelm Heyne, 1971), 2:455.
17. The texts of many of them are available on the GPA.
18. For examples, see GPA/ah-art.htm.
19. Adolf Hitler: Bilder aus dem Leben des Führers (Hamburg: Cigaretten/
Bilderdienst Hamburg-Bahrenfeld, 1936). Parts of the book are available in GPA/ah.htm.
The Propagandas of Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic Page 24
