As the sign posts of the 20th century are fasting receding if not fading altogether in the reflective history of our past, it begins to boggle the mind, at least for those of my generation to consider that World War II raged over seventy years ago.
Somehow it seems impossible to the mind of this esoteric that those cataclysmic times are so far removed from our peripheral historical vision, that there exists people of today who even question the validity of some of the more horrific aspects of that world wide deluge of destruction and manslaughter.
When I was in middle school in the late seventies, I became fascinated with the futuristic, at least for the time in which they were conceptualized, architecture of Albert Speer, the Nazi Party’s chosen architect in residence.
It would not be too far a stretch to say that I had memorized almost every word of Inside The Third Reich and Spandau: The Secret Diaries, from having read them so much. I will say without doubt, those two paperback books were in all seriousness the most dog-eared tomes on the planet.
Sunday nights meant World At War, another historical delight and thus, an esoteric adventure! However, this had to be viewed on the sly, as it was well past my dictated bedtime.
Without doubt, the nights that fascinated me the most dealt with Nazi Germany. Mainly because I was so incredulous that such a state ever existed in the first place, and a state that inflicted such harm and ill toward the world at large!
I remember distinctly one episode that dealt with the propaganda that was generated by the Nazi Party to entice the people of Germany
A visual person by nature, I could easily see how the people of Germany worn down by defeat, inflation and status, would gravitate to and be pulled into the concept of a rallying cry of national pride, so effectively conveyed in these sumptuous art deco posters.
By definition, propaganda, is the intentional coordinated attempt to influence public opinion through the use of media and was skillfully used by the Nazi Party in the years leading up to and during Adolf Hitler's leadership of Germany
The pervasive use of propaganda by the Nazis is largely responsible for the word ‘propaganda’ itself acquiring its present negative connotations.
One aspect that proved most effective was poster art, so much so that it became a mainstay of the Nazi propaganda effort, aimed both at Germany
Posters were also used in schools, depicting, for instance, an institution for the feeble-minded on one hand and houses on the other, to inform the students that the annual cost of this institution would build 17 homes for health families.
By Nazi standards, fine art was not propaganda. Its purpose was to create ideals, for eternity. This produced a call for heroic and romantic art, which reflected the ideal rather than the realistic. Explicitly political paintings were very rare. Still more rare were anti-Semitic paintings, because the art was supposed to be on a higher plane. Nevertheless, selected themes, common in propaganda, were the most common topics of art.
Landscape painting featured mostly heavily in the Greater German Art exhibition, in accordance with themes of blood and soil. Peasants were also popular images, reflecting a simple life in harmony with nature, frequently with large families. With the advent of war, war art came to be a significant though still not predominating aspect of the proportion. The continuing of the German Art Exhibition throughout the war was put forth as a manifestation of German's culture.
Nazi propaganda promoted Nazi ideology by demonizing the enemies of the Nazi Party, especially Jews and communists, but also capitalists and intellectuals. It promoted the values asserted by the Nazis, including heroic death, Führerprinzip (leader principle), Volksgemeinschaft (people's community), Blut und Boden (blood and soil) and pride in the German race.
Propaganda was also used to maintain the cult of personality around Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, and to promote campaigns for eugenics and the annexation of German-speaking areas. After the outbreak of World War II, Nazi propaganda vilified Germany 's enemies, notably the United Kingdom , the Soviet Union and the United States
Nazi propaganda is a relatively recent topic of close study. Historians of all persuasions, including Eastern Bloc writers, agree about its remarkable effectiveness. Their assessment of its significance, however – whether it shaped or merely directed and exploited public opinion – is influenced by their approach to wider questions raised by the study of Nazi Germany, such as the question whether the Nazi state was a fully totalitarian dictatorship, as argued by Hannah Arendt, or whether it also depended on a certain societal consensus.
Thinking back to a random Sunday night over thirty years ago, I can still ‘see’ the episode in my mind’s eye of the lush visual created by the art of the that lost criminal regime.
Art based on hatred!
NR
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