Film Propaganda and the Nature of the Nazi Regime

by Alberto Di Felice

January 2008

Introduction

David Weinberg has written about cinema and Nazism: “Paradoxically, the medium which so masterfully creates timeless illusion and fantasy may well prove to be an indispensable tool for understanding one of the most frightening realities of modern history” (Weinberg, 1984: 123). This essay will explore the connection between Nazism and film propaganda during the Third Reich. It will show how the evolution of film production during the Nazi regime highlights a strong link with previous cinematic tradition, most notably in the case of narrative cinema. It will be argued that such continuity accounts for Nazism’s difficult self-definition due to its ambivalent relationship with modern culture.

New ideology, old dilemmas

The first problem one encounters when attempting to define the exact origins, motivations, and progress of National Socialism is perhaps its across-the-board relationship with the social, ideological, and cultural dilemmas that preceded it. Put crudely, National Socialism was the result of a general “moral revolt traced from before 1914 through the trenches of World War I and postwar moral dislocation” (Saunders, 1998: 227).
Richard Bessel (2004) identifies four common themes that characterize the early stages of the movement, its roots in German society and politics, and finally the history of the Third Reich. First among these, the echo of war and its legacy—namely a widespread hatred of the Versailles Treaty—created an embittered, neurotic post-war society with broad popular support for the politics of revenge. Second, racism, and especially anti-Semitism, though probably not essential in Hitler’s rise to power, was also widely accepted or at least tolerated socially and within state institutions—especially the police. Third, the use of violence and intimidation, in particular through control of the police after 1933, was instrumental to the creation and consolidation of Nazism in that it eliminated any current or potential opposition. But most important among these themes, decisive for the Nazi capture of power was the profound need in German society for the reestablishment of order and stability—i.e., the need to remove the Social Democrats and the trade union movement from the exercise of politics. Crucially, this was felt perhaps most deeply among conservative elites, to the point that Adolf Hitler was at some stage informally elected representative of German monarchists who wanted to restore the old Wilhelmine order (Herwig, 1974). As Heinrich Winkler aptly summarizes:

Both the middle and upper classes assumed that National Socialism wished to restore and modernize the political substance of the pre-republican system. That did not necessarily mean restoration of the Empire, but it did mean depriving the victors of the November revolution of their power. In other words, the supporters of the National Socialists expected the destruction of the “Marxist” labor movement and the “party state”; they hoped for a rigid authoritarian regime, which would cease to tolerate class struggles and ideological conflict (Winkler, 1976: 12–3).

National-socialist rhetoric, directed mainly at the lower middle class which had traditionally constituted the movement’s social base (Baldwin, 1990), found correspondence with more intellectualized ideas associated with the defense of Western civilization that circulated among the upper social classes and political elites (Kershaw, 2004). This allowed Hitler to reconcile the conflicting responses that the combination of nationalism and socialism, as set out in the party’s name and program, had met in more conservative circles. He was able to identify the common denominator of the irrational hopes and expectations of salvation of all groups—namely, the destruction of the Weimar system (Winkler, 1976). Notwithstanding initial opinions that Hitler was “simply not qualified to be a leader” (Magnus von Levetzow, cited in Herwig, 1974: 108), he thus came to embody in the minds of all classes what Max Weber has called “charismatic authority,” the idea of national salvation. The nature of this authority would then be institutionalized with corrupting effects in all segments of the most advanced state in Europe (Kershaw, 2004).
It is exactly this nature that can shed valuable light on the functioning of the Nazi regime and propaganda machinery, especially with regard to film. Emerging from dialogue with various currents of its time—socialism, nationalism, imperialism, racism—and the Great War, Nazism faced the tactical dilemma of a political latecomer. It had to attract a broad public from across all sectors of society, selling itself as the ultimate antidote to economic crisis, the erosion of standards and values, and demoralization (Baldwin, 1990). This is inextricably linked to the problematic definition of the very content of Nazi ideology, its contradictions, and the overlapping interests it purported to represent.
In his reconstruction of the social explanations of Nazism, Peter Baldwin (1990) highlights a hiatus between the party as a movement up to its climb to power (movement phase) and the formation of the regime (system phase). The party’s initial special relationship cultivated with the lower middle class was gradually transmuted into a strategic partnership with traditional elites—i.e., churchmen, civil servants, military officials, and economic leaders.

The petty bourgeois fascism of the pre-power phase was gradually conquered by the fascism of big capital as the party now began to fulfill its true function: taming the unions, promoting rearmament and expansion and generally serving the interests of capital whose hegemony was threatened. Coming close to power on the backs of the lower middle class, German fascism changed gear and revealed its true nature at the moment it began negotiating with economic elites for support. The social base necessary to approach power was exchanged for a social function on behalf of elites that was not deducible from the party’s earlier support (Baldwin, 1990: 13).

As a consequence, if the regime was to stay alive, Nazi ideology had to be prudently maneuvered in order to appease both the party’s radical adherents (the petty bourgeoisie) and its tactical allies (economic elites). A generic appeal to Volksgemeinschaft⎯a rejuvenated, re-born Germany based on racial purity and the concept of struggle, and free from the fallacies of bourgeois liberalism and Marxism⎯was to serve this purpose.

In order to manufacture a consensus where one did not previously exist, the nazi propaganda machine would constantly urge the population to put “the community before the individual” (Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz) and to place their faith in slogans like “One People! One Reich! One Führer!” To this end, the political function of propaganda was to co-ordinate the political will of the nation with the aims of the state⎯or if this proved impossible with certain groups (for example, sections of the industrial working class and Bavarian Catholics), to establish at least passive acquiescence (Welch, 2004: 218).

In the light of the contradictions and tensions within German society, Hitler’s charisma and the Führer myth became the central pillar of the regime’s peculiar structure. They were the glue that held Nazi ideology together in that they provided people from all strata of society with notions vague enough to ensure “plenty of ideological overlaps even without complete identity” (Kershaw, 2004: 252). This was clearly reflected by Hitler’s leadership style, which “avoid[ed] clarity and precision in role allocation, leaving it to the initiatives of individuals and allowing the role to emerge in response to developing circumstances” (Noakes, 2004: 193).
In a way, one could therefore agree with Karl-Dietrich Bracher’s contention that “it was indeed Hitler’s ‘Weltanschauung’ and nothing else that mattered in the end” (cited in Kershaw, 2004: 242). Such contention, however, needs to be specified. It was not the Führer’s ideology that was decisive—and, in the long run, fatal—as much as its lack of a clear form. Nazi propaganda performed the key function of trying to put this lack of form to good use. This is most evident in the case of film propaganda, to which we now turn.

Film and the trap of modernity

What is most puzzling about Nazism is perhaps the continuity with modernity that its project of national rebirth entailed. Some have even described Nazism as a modernist epiphenomenon. Roger Griffin, for example, argues that Nazism’s “palingenetic core ensured that it was not reactionary, but revolutionary, not anti-modern, but a bid to create a new type of modernity” (cited in Saunders, 1998: 232). The transition of German cinema to the Third Reich provides a striking parallel.
Michael Meyer holds that “the fate of German music tells us a great deal about the formulation of Nazi attitudes and policies toward society, and about Nazi mythology and ideology” (Meyer, 1975: 649). The same applies to the fate of German cinema under Nazism. Both music and film proved valuable allies in the attempt “to forge an awareness of the notion of ‘experience’ (Erlebnis) as the spiritual bond that cemented individuals to [the] new all-embracing ethnic community” (Welch, 2004: 218).
For all its vagueness, Nazism did provide a clear central argument: a natural harmony of interests had been disintegrated by the evils of modern society, and needed to be reconstructed in the new German Volksgemeinschaft that the newborn Nazi state was to define. On the face of it, the national-socialist project appears to stand in stark contrast with everything modern. Yet it fully appropriates something that lies at the very basis of modern civilization and represents its constitutive element—the nation-state.
The coincidence of state and nation that National Socialism sought to attain was nothing but a neo-romantic continuation and radicalization of the main goal of the nineteenth-century state—shaping citizens’ choices, attitudes, and emotions according to the national goals defined by the state. Nazi rhetoric testifies to a profound understanding of German history, culture, and popular emotions. Inasmuch as a unity of exclusion and hatred vis-à-vis the “November criminals”—that is, Marxists and Jews—was all that antagonistic social groups could agree on, National Socialism simply had to replicate and renew Bismarck’s Reichsfeinde technique of defining community negatively (Baldwin, 1990).

The destruction of the “marxist” labor movement, of the parliamentary system of government, and of political pluralism was the undisguised expression of everything that National Socialism promised to contribute towards the reconstruction of the German Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community). What one might describe as symbolic or secondary integration served the same purpose: the diversion of aggression against a ‘diabolical’ enemy, international Jewry, and the fabrication of a supra-materialistic sphere in which the nation recovered its unity. The cult of the leader and the Volksgemeinschaft, extreme nationalism and racial ideology had their social function in precisely this attempt to mystically overcome economically determined contradictions (Winkler, 1976: 11–2).

From this standpoint, it can be argued that National Socialism was founded on the “ecstasy of the ruled.” Indeed, recent analyses have focused on the role of Nazism as a cultural system aiming to organize the desires and expectations of the “New Man” around the “illusion of wholeness,” a fusion of politics and aesthetics which could fabricate a “beautiful lie” in the form of fantasies of reconciliation, coherence, and harmony (Saunders, 1998). In his study of Nazi Musikpolitik, Meyer observes in a similar vein that:

[T]he Nazis believed in the efficacy of art, in the delusionary spell of the phantasmagoric suspension of reality, change and relative truths; they manipulated art on behalf of the artistically conceived thousand-year empire. The contents of the artistic message were said to be embodied in Hitler who commanded not only politicians but also musicians. … Hitler’s person assumed an importance formerly reserved for religious leaders and heroes of the past, like those appearing in Wagner’s operas (Meyer, 1975: 662).

Cinema too came to be dominated by the need to create phantasmagoric myths of wholeness that could cancel—or at least minimize the importance of—socio-economic and political divisions. As has already been noted, the Führer cult stood at the center of this effort to reshape the nation and the “New Man.” When one thinks of Hitler’s quasi-religious “charismatic authority,” on which people could project “their own desire for a ‘heroic’ national leader” (Kershaw, 2004: 250), the projection of a movie onto a screen comes almost automatically to mind. As Nazi ideology, a response to irrational hopes, was projected onto Hitler’s persona, one could imagine those same irrational hopes being projected back onto a movie theater screen.
There are three main reasons why cinema, the art of modernity, was particularly suited to serve Nazi propaganda. First, unlike cultural arts such as music and literature and methods of direct political communications such as radio and the press, film as a visual medium is more directly apprehended in that it is not confined to language and literacy. Second, its broad public appeal can spread propaganda more successfully among the masses. Third, and more significant, the kind of experience that seeing a film in a movie theater provides is substantially different from any other: to a certain extent, the individual spectator has a communal relationship with the rest of the crowd, and responds not only to what is shown on-screen but also to the crowd’s reaction to it (Chapman, 2000). More than any other medium, cinema had therefore the ability to serve as the ultimate mass meeting that National Socialism needed to control the individual’s relationship with the national community, in much the same way that rallies and commemorative gatherings surrendered egotism, identity and will to the image of the Führer and the “New Man.” One only needs to watch Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will to see a perfect choreography where film fully coincides with what Bernd Hüppauf has called “militarist mechanical ballet” (cited in Saunders, 1998: 234; see also Hinton, 1975).
The potential of film propaganda, of course, was not lost on the Führer himself. He and Goebbels were in fact early cinema enthusiasts. In his Mein Kampf Hitler wrote:

The picture in all its forms up to the film has greater possibilities. Here a man needs to use his brains even less; it suffices to look, or at most to read extremely brief texts, and thus many will more readily accept a pictorial presentation than read an article of any length. The picture brings them in a much briefer time, I might almost say at one stroke, the enlightenment which they obtain from written matter only after arduous reading (cited in Chrystal, 1975: 29).

These words are particularly salient in relation to Nazi propaganda aimed at youth, probably the best example of the Nazi emphasis on participation, comradeship, and enthusiasm. A Sopade report of the early 1930s acknowledges: “The new generation has never had much use for education and reading. Now nothing is demanded of them; on the contrary, knowledge is publicly condemned” (cited in Welch, 2004: 233). It is not coincidental that the first important propagandist movie of the Reich was Hans Steinhoff’s Hitlerjunge Quex, based on the true story of the first official Hitler Youth martyr. The movie was a celebration of the central tenet of the Hitler Youth: life as preparation for a noble warrior’s death, and the consequent national rebirth (Baird, 1983). What is most interesting about this movie and about most of film production under Nazism, however, is the fact that such propagandistic celebration did not present itself as overtly political, but was built into a classical narrative structure. We will return to this point further on.
Hitler’s testimony to the power of cinema was closely mirrored by Goebbels’s belief that cinema was “one of the most modern and far-reaching media that there is for influencing the masses,” which in turn echoed Lenin’s famous remark: “of all the arts, for us cinema is the most important” (both cited in Chapman, 2000: 683). What differentiates Nazi fascism from Soviet communism, and Nazi from Soviet film propaganda, however, is Nazism’s aforementioned continuity with inherited modern structures. In particular, Nazism was contingent upon the cultural developments initiated in the capitalist-bourgeois world of the early part of the century. Among these, the connection between aesthetics and politics, and the modernist revolt against decadence that had its roots in the rebirth of mankind of expressionism and futurism, were of extreme importance. As Thomas Saunders explains:

[T]he combination of capitalist socio-economic relations and an image-saturated public realm forced fascist symbols and images to compete with popular amusements and the department store. Although a fascist lifestyle meant rejection of consumerism with its cult of personal comfort and happiness, fascist aesthetics were steeped in consumer culture (Saunders, 1998: 237).

Cinema, in its classic Hollywood form of popular medium, was no less than a byproduct of such consumer culture, which Nazi fascism could not steer clear of because of its need to reach the widest public possible. In order to attract an audience that had already been drawn in by the magic of cinema, Nazism necessarily had to realistically follow popular taste and conform itself to a “lifestyle modernism”—the quintessence of everything against which the Nazis vehemently rebelled—whose foundations were essentially American (Petro, 1998). In direct contrast to Soviet propaganda, which was commonly found in non-fiction, Nazi propaganda was thus forced to rely more heavily on popular cinematic entertainment to convey its worldview (Chapman, 2000). As David Weinberg poignantly puts it:

[A]s a regime committed to an escapist world-view, the Third Reich used popular culture to objectify its ideals in everyday life. Because it was irrational, it was necessary for the regime to control every aspect of reality. Films, with their ability both to distort reality and to mesmerize audiences, proved a particularly valuable tool for the inculcation of the new ideology (Weinberg, 1984: 113).

The late Sir Kenneth Clark once wrote that “film propaganda will be most effective when it is least recognizable as such” (cited in Chapman, 2000: 688). Goebbels himself thought that the best way to get the regime’s message across was by hiding it (Saunders, 1998). In other words: to promote Nazism’s vague ideology, propaganda needed to be just as elusive. Narrative cinema, as opposed to non-fiction, was a highly effective—and perhaps the ultimate—means “to mystically overcome economically determined contradictions.” Audiences were usually somewhat hostile to short films, documentaries and newsreels, probably because their being purely propagandist productions and their oftentimes poor quality limited their commercial appeal. By contrast, classical narrative feature films, which represented the dominant mode of film practice—and one highly appreciated by the public—could better serve propaganda purposes in covert form (Weinberg, 1984).
Nazi rhetoric was thus transplanted into the already codified styles and genres of classical cinematic representation, which it borrowed, and which continued to dominate movie screens. Nazi cinema learned to use the dual strategy of “visual enticement and narrative containment” commonly found in classical entertainment and escapist fare—subordinating “space, time, and movement to the structures of dramatic development and closure” (Petro, 1998: 54). As will be apparent, in line with the marked continuities between modernity and Nazism, there can be found substantial continuities between pre-Nazi and Nazi cinema. There is, however, one crucial difference. Although Nazi film propaganda and classical narrative cinema operated within the same structures and formulas, what Nazism was trying to do with them was not simply reproduce and placate the liberal-bourgeois world of which cinema was an integral part: it wanted to overthrow it.

[F]ascism and film were natural accomplices. However, the fascist worldview rejected the very reconciliation and resolution which classical narrative promised. Although it may have paid lip-service to a Utopian future, its understanding of historical development was circular and catastrophic rather than linear. In blunt terms, its vision of (domestic) harmony was a state of perpetual (international) war! Ultimately, therefore, while bourgeois narrative and aesthetic principles were readily absorbed by fascism, they sat very awkwardly with fascist intentions (Saunders, 1998: 242).

As a result, Nazism was only partially able to turn the intrinsically consumerist nature of cinema to its advantage. Nazi film propaganda was only successful to the extent that, through narrative escapism, it de-politicized the idea of Volksgemeninschaft in order to gain acquiescence from the antagonistic groups whose support was essential for the regime (Welch, 2004).
As has already been noted, the need to appease the demands of such a broad public was at the center of the regime’s political strategy as well as propaganda machine. This required a difficult balancing of interests between the radicalism of National Socialism as a movement and the conservative elites that endorsed the Nazi regime. Nazism tried to achieve this unity by means of an escapist ideology and escapist narratives, but the fact that these were still dependent on fundamentally modern structures was at the root of their failure. In the words of Peter Baldwin: “The peculiarly blind striving that explains why nazism was so incomparably grotesque, in the end so irrationally self-destructive, was the outcome of this inherent contradiction between movement and regime” (Baldwin, 1990: 25).

Conclusion

This essay has explored the relationship between film propaganda and the nature of the Nazi regime. It has argued that Nazism’s need to balance the competing interests of movement and regime produced an ideology that lacked definite shape, and which was heavily dependent on the very modern structures against which the movement originally rebelled. The reliance on popular narrative cinema, the art of modernity, as vehicle for this ideology is clear evidence of such fatal contradiction.

REFERENCES

Jay W. Baird, “From Berlin to Neubabelsberg: Nazi Film Propaganda and Hitler Youth Quex,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 18, No. 3, July 1983, pp. 495–515.

Peter Baldwin, “Social Interpretations of Nazism: Renewing a Tradition,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 25, No. 1, January 1990, pp. 5–37.

Richard Bessel, “The Nazi Capture of Power,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 39, No. 2, April 2004, pp. 169–88.

James Chapman, “The Power of Propaganda,” Review Article, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 35, No. 4, October 2000, pp. 679–88.

William G. Chrystal, “Nazi Party Election Films, 1927-1938,” Cinema Journal, Vol. 15, No. 1, Autumn 1975, pp. 29–47.

Holger H. Herwig, “From Kaiser to Führer: The Political Road of a German Admiral, 1923-33,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 9, No. 2, April 1974, pp. 107–20.

David B. Hinton, “‘Triumph of the Will’: Document or Artifice?,” Cinema Journal, Vol. 15, No. 1, Autumn 1975, pp. 48–57.

Ian Kershaw, “Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 39, No. 2, April 2004, pp. 239–54.

Bernard Mees, “Hitler and Germanentum,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 39, No. 2, April 2004, pp. 255–70.

Michael Meyer, “The Nazi Musicologist as Myth Maker in the Third Reich,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 10, No. 4, October 1975, pp. 649–65.

Jeremy Noakes, “Leaders of the People? The Nazi Party and German Society,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 39, No. 2, April 2004, pp. 189–212.

Patrice Petro, “Nazi Cinema at the Intersection of the Classical and the Popular,” New German Critique, No. 74, Spring–Summer 1998, pp. 41–55.

Thomas J. Saunders, “A ‘New Man’: Fascism, Cinema and Image Creation,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 12, No. 2, 1998, pp. 227–46.

David Weinberg, “Approaches to the Study of Film in the Third Reich: A Critical Appraisal,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 19, No. 1, January 1984, pp. 105–26.

David Welch, “Nazi Propaganda and the Volksgemeinschaft: Constructing a People’s Community,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 39, No. 2, April 2004, pp. 213–38.

Heinrich August Winkler, “German Society, Hitler and the Illusion of Restoration 1930-33,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 11, No. 4, October 1976, pp. 1–16.