* * *
The most important difference between these texts and Hitler’s has to do with their style. The racial theory expressed in Nordenstreng’s article is penned in the objective, matter-of-fact style employed by all scholarly discourse, a style we take to indicate truth. Truth, objectivity, meticulousness, overview, certainty, insight, all these things are inherent in the style. The figures, the tables, the Latin terminology, everything connotes truth and absolute reliability. This is reinforced by the text delimiting and keeping apart what it can state with certainty and what it cannot state with certainty. A link between race and psychology, a biological connection, is likely but cannot yet be asserted on the available evidence. In this way, the text suggests that everything else it says about race may be asserted with certainty on the available evidence, at the same time as it opens the possibility of race and psychology indeed being biologically linked. The immediate association of truth with the style employed here, its rhetorical figures and tropes, is plain to us now that the content has been so discredited, not only as speculative and unscientific, but also as dangerous and, at root, evil.
But wherein does this evil lie for us? In the scholarly, scientific style there is solicitude too, for what is presented here is knowledge, insights gained by these scientists, not on their own behalf, but on behalf of the community, and this knowledge is what they impart to us in their articles and papers. Solicitude and also a clear notion of progress; the field is new, no one has studied these things before, no one has considered them before, but with the giant strides taken in biology in the latter part of the nineteenth century, with Darwin’s groundbreaking explanatory theory of the origin of species, and before that Linnaeus’s all-encompassing taxonomy, this advance, the establishment of an institute of racial theory and the opening up of an entirely new field of research, we approach deeper insights into the human species that will yield obvious opportunities for further progress, for only a small step from this racial biology lay eugenics, the new theory of racial hygiene, whereby the health and procreation of entire peoples could be steered in whichever direction was found to be desirable, for instance by sterilizing undesirable elements such as schizophrenics, the mentally ill, habitual criminals, vagrants, and Gypsies, as actually took place in Sweden, Norway, the United States, and Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.
This occurred on the basis of this research, under state auspices, pushing back the boundaries of what the state was and could be: the concept of public health goes back to this period, for the idea that the state should be responsible for the health and well-being of the individual is by no means a given, and its attendant notions of healthy minds in healthy bodies, of poverty and darkness and poor health being swept away as the sun shone in on hardship and abjection, which then would jump up invigorated, of poor children being sent to the countryside in summer, of health visitors and vaccinations, were all about the conjugation of body and state. And it was carried out by decent people with decent intentions, the thought that it might be wrong to sterilize a woman suffering from delusions and unable to look after herself being not at all obvious, since there was a risk, if she became pregnant, that she might pass on her affliction to the detriment of her child, and thereby also burden society as a whole.
The division of human beings into the racially pure and the racially impure, superior and inferior by implication, belongs to the same paradigm, and it is this scientification or biologization of the human, and nothing else, that makes Hitler’s racial theory, and his subsequent racial policy, possible. Without it, anti-Semitism is just an irrational emotion, an obvious scapegoating, a paranoia within the culture that can be taken more or less seriously, but never be employed as the basis of any political program. Hitler kept up with international research in eugenics as it was conducted in Europe and the United States, before and after he became Reich chancellor. He was familiar with the work of leading American eugenicists such as Leon Whitney, director of the American Eugenics Society, Charles Davenport, a Harvard-educated biologist and prominent representative of the American sterilization program, and Paul Popenoe of the Human Betterment Foundation. Ryback quotes the following from a speech given by Hitler in the mid-1930s:
Now that we know the laws of heredity it is possible to a large extent to prevent unhealthy and severely handicapped beings from coming into the world. I have studied with interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.
According to Ryback, Hitler also met the American eugenicist and fiercely anti-Semitic racial theorist Lothrop Stoddard in 1939, when Stoddard was working as a correspondent in Berlin and received a personal invitation from the Führer on account of his work in the field. Stoddard promised Hitler that he would not make reference to their meeting, but he would later state that Hitler’s handshake had been firm, though he had not sought eye contact, subsequently writing more generally of Germany’s relationship with racial hygiene:
The relative emphasis which Hitler gave racialism and eugenics many years ago foreshadows the respective interest toward the two subjects in Germany today. Outside Germany, the reverse is true, due chiefly to Nazi treatment of its Jewish minority. Inside Germany, the Jewish problem is regarded as a passing phenomenon, already settled in principle and soon to be settled in fact by the physical elimination of the Jews themselves from the Third Reich. It is the regeneration of the Germanic stock with which public opinion is most concerned and which it seeks to further in various ways.
The scientification of racial thinking, the entire scientific apparatus that was set up around it, with its specially constructed instruments for cranial measurement, its tables and graphs, its Latin terminology, and technical vocabulary, lent such thinking legitimacy, and although Hitler’s book contains no trace of the scholarly style, it is nevertheless Mein Kampf that makes the connection between culture and nature possible, the coupling of state and body, politics and biology, all so central to Hitler’s ideology. Mein Kampf is an extreme version of that mind-set, and while many found it exaggerated and bordering on the paranoid and could not believe he meant it seriously, certainly not as he approached the corridors of power and thereby became outwardly more respectable, they did not question the fundamental goal of such a policy, which was to improve the stock, the race, to lift it upward into a resplendently healthy, morally unassailable future.
* * *
Hatred of the Jews was nothing new, it was prevalent in the world of Faust; Martin Luther hated the Jews, and their persecution went far back into history, as ancient as themselves, an integral part of their own self-image and of the cultures that surrounded them, as though somehow it were embedded in the villages and forests, a mythical fabric from long before the Enlightenment, yet still in force, for example in the great impoverished rural areas of Poland, where the familiar prejudices relating to the Jews – that they were rich, that they hoodwinked and cheated people, that they took care of their own – were ingrained in the culture and explanatory of the indigenous population’s hardships and miseries. The Jew-hatred of Hitler and the Nazis, however, was new in the sense that it was related to modernity, to the cities and the mass human, not to the Jewish peddler Papst encountered in Hamsun’s Wayfarers but to international finance and international Marxism. Racial theory was new as well, and provided the mind-set with a legitimacy that removed it from the mythical and placed it firmly within the realms of the rational and the modern. Most striking, however, is the coming together of the mythical and the modern in propaganda, where the images of that ancient hatred – the Jews portrayed as rats, the Jews portrayed as pigs, the Jews portrayed as evil – are projected through the new technology, in moving pictures on cinema screens, living voices on the radio, drawn thereby into a world of automobiles, neon lights, factories, telephones, and films, as its antithesis and primitive prelude.
Hitler was just as forthright about his thin
king on propaganda in Mein Kampf as he was about his anti-Semitism, his antidemocratism and his Lebensraum ideology, whose consequence could never be anything else but war.
But whereas his anti-Semitism and nationalism were idealistic in nature, amalgamated by racial biology, his thoughts on propaganda were pragmatic. Propaganda was the most important means of carrying through his idealistic aims, and so convinced was he of its power that he was quite open about it. As Peter Sloterdijk notes, Hitler was so sure of himself when it came to the potency of propaganda that he felt he could afford to reveal his recipe. Hitler referred to propaganda as a weapon, “a frightful one in the hand of an expert.”
The second really decisive question was this: To whom should propaganda be addressed? To the scientifically trained intelligentsia or to the less educated masses?
It must be addressed always and exclusively to the masses …
The function of propaganda does not lie in the scientific training of the individual, but in calling the masses’ attention to certain facts, processes, necessities, etc., whose significance is thus for the first time placed within their field of vision.
The whole art consists in doing this so skillfully that everyone will be convinced that the fact is real, the process necessary, the necessity correct, etc. But since propaganda is not and cannot be the necessity in itself, since its function, like the poster, consists in attracting the attention of the crowd, and not in educating those who are already educated or who are striving after education and knowledge, its effect for the most part must be aimed at the emotions and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect.
All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be. But if, as in propaganda for sticking out a war, the aim is to influence a whole people, we must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public, and too much caution cannot be exerted in this direction. The more modest its intellectual ballast, the more exclusively it takes into consideration the emotions of the masses, the more effective it will be. And this is the best proof of the soundness or unsoundness of a propaganda campaign, and not success in pleasing a few scholars or young aesthetes.
The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses. The fact that our bright boys do not understand this merely shows how mentally lazy and conceited they are …
The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered. In this way the result is weakened and in the end entirely canceled out. Thus we see that propaganda must follow a simple line and correspondingly the basic tactics must be psychologically sound.
The most crucial aspect of propaganda, however, is not its simplicity, that it may be understandable even to the least intelligent member of the crowd, but rather that it is entirely subjective, without so much as a hint of objectivity about it, and displaying not the slightest form of nuance as to any subject.
What, for example, would we say about a poster that was supposed to advertise a new soap and that described other soaps as “good”?
We would only shake our heads.
Exactly the same applies to political advertising.
The function of propaganda is, for example, not to weigh and ponder the rights of different people, but exclusively to emphasize the one right which it has set out to argue for. Its task is not to make an objective study of the truth, insofar as it favors the enemy, and then set it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly.
What is intriguing about this section of Mein Kampf is that Hitler is telling it like it is, propaganda is manipulation, often presenting pure lies so repeatedly and so insistently as to make them truths. One would think that for a politician to write something of this nature would be to undermine his entire credibility and kill him off politically, yet Hitler ventures to do so for two reasons: firstly because propaganda is a means to an end, that end being so important and so just, so beneficial to society, that any means are permitted in search of its achievement, including lies – pragmatism exists for the sake of idealism and is its servant, not the other way around; secondly because he is so certain propaganda works and is so robust in itself as not to be threatened by any such synopsis or admission; this is what he is saying, that the complex, the objectivized, the nuanced will never reach a wide segment of any audience and find effect there, this moreover being true of his own words here.
The dialectic is anything but unfamiliar to us in our day, everyone knows that advertising, which exists all around us to such an extent that it fills our lives almost to the brim, is manipulative and untrue, that the picture advertising paints of the world is a lie, which nevertheless does not stop us from being influenced by it and doing what it wants us to do: I know that drinking Coca-Cola is not going to turn me into an unworried American teenager, but I still prefer it to Jolly Cola when I am out buying in the supermarket, and I know too that Dove soap is basically the same as any other brand, the only difference being in the packaging and advertising budget, but whose soap do I put in my basket? Advertising seems immune to any critical insight into its nature, and in this respect Hitler was right. As such, advertising is indeed related to beauty and charisma: we may want complexity and knowledge, but in the final analysis other, simpler, more immutable forces prevail. The difference between our society and Hitler’s is that we have banished all such forces and all that we associate with them to an unthreatening domain, one which is least accountable to reality, the world of fiction and images, which is to say entertainment culture, refusing to allow them into other domains that are highly accountable to reality, such as politics, education, administration, or the private sphere, unless in the guise of the inauthentic. The fact that we operate with one compartment for the authentic, another for the inauthentic, to which advertising and the power of advertising belong, is perhaps what saves us from some of the forces that were set free in Europe three generations ago. Though not forever, there being an element of the unknown in this, the system always containing something that cannot be said although it is true, and at some point, one might speculate, the power of truth will prevail. In a society without physical hardship, where violence among like kind is regulated, it is hard to imagine that this could happen; never has a society been further from revolution as our own, never has any human population been so comfortably dulled in hygge as our own, but our world too has its downside, the so-called Third World, where structural violence is quite as merciless and destructive as it once was in Europe, and if it were to be set in motion against us, it is by no means certain that the good and the bad, the moral and the immoral, the true and the untrue could be kept apart from each other as they are today.
* * *
Hitler’s insight was that emotions are always stronger than arguments, and that the power that resides in a we, the yearning and desire for community is unfathomably greater than that which resides in solicitude toward a they. Propaganda directs itself to emotions, not to intellect, which it insults, and some of this same dynamic applies to what he writes about the precedence of the spoken word over the written; the spoken word goes at least potentially directly to feelings and so works from within, since what a person feels always eclipses what they might think, an emotionally based opinion is felt to be exactly what it is, something one knows, as opposed to a ration
ally based opinion, which is quite differently relative in nature, being open to objective, reasoned argument and thereby capable of being changed by such argument.
The written word complicates, the spoken word simplifies, at least when directed toward moods and emotions, something the written word, or at least the political and argumentative written word, cannot. This is why firstly music and secondly painting are Hitler’s preferred art forms; both communicate without words, through emotion. That he understood this, and understood how to exploit it politically, was what set him apart from all other politicians of his day.
* * *
When Hitler was appointed Reich chancellor in 1933 and the Nazis assumed power, a shift occurred in public language in a number of respects. It became simpler, the same words repeated over and over again. Victor Klemperer traces this back to Hitler and Mein Kampf, published eight years earlier, which he sees as establishing every characteristic of Nazi language use. With the Nazi takeover in 1933, what previously had been group-speak became the language of the people, a Volkssprache, Klemperer writes, and the significant thing about that shift was that this language took possession of the entire spectrum of German life, its private as well as its public aspects. Politics, the courts, the economy, art, science, school, sport, family, nurseries, the armed forces. The Nazis intervened in everything, and they did so by means of their language. It was simple, uniform, and based on speech. The new technologies such as radio and film turned communication between the one and the all into something that happened in the moment – as opposed to the printed word, which could be read at any time, in any place, and as many times as the reader wished – and meant that the message reached everyone, even those unable or unwilling to read. Klemperer writes of how the Nazis erased the distinction between written and spoken language, turning everything into oration, address, exhortation, invective. There was no difference between the propaganda minister’s speeches and tracts, and no longer any divide between public and private. This is what Klemperer describes, the shift that occurs, starting in 1933, not only in the language of the state but also in the language of the individual. The state speaks in the guise of the one, one voice penetrating into the all, and the one among the all soon begins to speak in the manner of the state, becoming its own expression. All newspapers, all magazines, all radio programs, all novels, all poems, all textbooks are colored by this language, which does not stop there, but spreads everywhere and to all.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 91