Marketing the Third Reich: Persuasion, Packaging and Propaganda by O'Shaughnessy Nicholas

Author:O'Shaughnessy, Nicholas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-09-20T07:00:00+00:00

Symbols

Visual To invoke as a descriptor of this regime the word ‘package’ would surely seem an anachronism. Even today, the very idea of a political party or a politician being ‘packaged’ would receive a contumelious sneer from some political scientists. Yet it is possible to argue that Nazism was represented by a totalising symbol system and that therefore the package was indeed the message. The broader system of public rituals took many forms. In general there is what we might call a gimcrack Prussianism, where elements of archaic Prussian military culture were re-imagined, distorted and dissolved into the texture of everyday life. The defunct imperial ceremonials of the ancien régime were replaced with a new ritual, celebratory not of monarchy and empire but of race and supremacy. But the militarism was also a way of retrieving lost pride, as for example in the Tannenberg Memorial ceremonies of October 1935.12 This was a nation in uniform, clad in essentially an updated imperial sartorial of the old Wilhelmine armies, cavalry boots, gold braid, insignia gleaming against its mounting on field grey cloth background. This represented a sustained appeal to male vanity; the smart, even spectacular costumery, the swathes of SS black, the glittering orders and decorations and hierarchies, and the highest of heights remotely glimpsed – the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds. The pictography of the regime was much enhanced by its support cast of thousands in their elaborate costumes and plumage. Brian Leigh Davis and Pierre Turner depict around 240 different uniforms from the Third Reich period, from Führer to Pimpfe to Stahlhelm to Post Office to falconry official to cabinet minister; sixteen ranks are listed for Hitler Youth, seventeen for Organisation Todt, eighteen for NSFK (National Socialist Flyers’ Corps), seventeen for Stahlhelm.13

The packaging embraced an entire structure of symbols from small badges to giant buildings: the same messages were being communicated. The regime pioneered a distinctive style in all of its public manifestations, for example architectural structures such as the Air Ministry, and sundry exercises in gigantism and extroversion. The statement they made was often the same – that this was the new Rome. The imagery associated with this packaging was brought to life by the Illustrierter Beobachter of March 1939 with its big photograph of Berlin.14 The city is shown in a swirling mass of lightness and dark – ranks of searchlights illuminate the sky, seething crowds, bright street lights, swastikas, classical buildings; all are decorated by a distinctive gift-wrapping such as the long red banners trailing much of the length of the buildings. Then there are the action shots of Hitler with his dynamic gestures acting the self-conceived role of Führer.

Spatial Public buildings were an integument of the packaging, a visible index of a political ethos and an expression of bombast. In 1929 Hitler remarked that ‘out of our new ideology and our political will to power we will create stone documents’.15 They had a use function but they also had an imagistic function. No

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