scholarly journals SLOGANS AND MOTTOES OF THE THIRD REICH AND THE WAY NAZI PROPAGANDA USED THEM

Author(s):  
Lev M. Ryazanovskiy ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 71-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen James-Chakraborty

Few tools of Nazi propaganda were as potent or as permanent asarchitecture. At the instigation of Hitler, who had once aspired to bean architect, the Nazi regime placed unusual importance on thedesign of environments—whether cities, buildings, parade grounds, orhighways—that would glorify the Third Reich and express its dynamicrelationship to both the past and the future. Architecture and urbandesign were integral to the way the regime presented itself at homeand abroad. Newsreels supplemented direct personal experience ofmonumental buildings. Designed to last a thousand years, these edificesappeared to offer concrete testimony of the regime’s enduringcharacter. A more subtle integration of modern functions and vernacularforms, especially in suburban housing, suggested that technologicalprogress could coexist with an “organic” national communityrooted in a quasi-sacred understanding of the landscape.


Author(s):  
Robert Eaglestone

The knowledge of the murder of the European Jews was a public secret in the Third Reich. What is a ‘public secret’? How does it shape or reshape a society? The answers to these questions are key to understanding the Holocaust and other genocides. However, the public secret is elusive because of its nature: when it is at its most powerful, it cannot be explicitly discussed; when it no longer holds such power, people deny their knowledge of it and complicity in its concealment. Both the ‘subjective experience’ of the public secret and its wider meaning are beyond the limits of the discipline of history and are better elucidated obliquely through a work of fiction: in this case Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, a novel which reflects on the past in the way historians cannot. Significantly, the public secret and the consequences of complicity are important concepts for understanding the post-Holocaust world.


2020 ◽  
pp. 22-47
Author(s):  
Thomas M. Lekan

This chapter examines the early career of Bernhard Grzimek, who became the director of the Frankfurt Zoo in 1945 after serving as a veterinarian and agricultural minister for the Third Reich. Grzimek became famous for transforming the zoo from a bombed-out shell into one of Europe’s most successful zoological gardens by combining insights from ethology and ecology to help the animals thrive in captivity. Behind his carefully crafted public image as savior of animals, however, Grzimek revealed in memoirs and writings about animal behavior a much darker self, haunted by fears of extinction, eugenic decline, and wartime displacement that signaled an inability to come to terms with his and his country’s Nazi experience. Grzimek’s concern about the spread of Western “degeneracy” to Africa explains the urgency of his quest to save animals and their habitats there—and the indifference he often displayed toward local and indigenous peoples who stood in the way of his pursuit.


Author(s):  
Stefan Danter

In “Caligari,” reprinted from Siegfried Kracauer’s hugely influential monograph From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film, Kracauer details the history of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the German Expressionist masterpiece that established the cinematic template for the “mad scientist” character trope. In particular, Kracauer outlines the process by which “a revolutionary film was thus turned into a conformist one,” both presaging and helping to pave the way, in his estimation, for rise of the Third Reich.


1971 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 242-270
Author(s):  
Yeshayahu Jelínek

The Slovak State was the first satellite of the Third Reich. It came into existence on March 14, 1939, preceding by one day the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia. Berlin regarded independent Slovakia as die Visitenkarte Deutschlands almost from the beginning. Therefore the way the Nazis treated this tiny state could indicate their general line toward other clients in southeastern Europe, and perhaps also on the rest of the Continent.


2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 325-327
Author(s):  
Peter Fritzsche

Between the two world wars, Germany was on the move. The slowdown of the Great Depression notwithstanding, more and more Germans took vacations and enjoyed weekend adventures, and when they traveled, they did so to destinations farther and farther away from home. Along the way, they filled up trains, hotels, and youth hostels. And it was very much Germany that Germans wanted to explore, following as they did quite explicit itineraries of the idealized nation. “Seeing Germany,” as Kristin Semmens puts it, was a way of possessing and occupying Germany. This was quite deliberately the case for the hundreds of thousands of visitors who took special trains to Stahlhelm marches, Reichsbanner demonstrations, and, later in the 1930s, the Nuremberg party rallies, for which more than 700 special trains were pressed into service in 1938. “Seeing Germany” was also at the heart of the new tourist practices the Nazis created: the camp experiences of the Hitler Youth and the rural outposts of the Reich Labor Service. Patriotism required an overnight stay.


Film Studies ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Marcus

Leni Riefenstahl was one of filmmakings most contentious directors. The power of her epic documentaries, Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938), have cemented her place in film history. More criticism has been written about Riefenstahl than any other director, except perhaps Hitchcock and Welles. Publicity surrounding the publication of an illustrated book marking her centenary reawakened debates about Riefenstahl‘s career in film and her involvement with the Third Reich. In this article, I focus on one of the key films which emerged from that relationship, Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens), which I discussed at length in my interview with Riefenstahl. Her recollections were sharp and I was intrigued by some of her answers, not for what new insight they offered, but for how they reaffirmed how she wished others to interpret her films and motivations. In particular, I was interested in the way she considered Triumph of the Will to be a realistic portrayal of the Nazi‘s 1934 Nuremberg Rally and the events surrounding it, and her role as a filmmaker in shaping that representation.


Author(s):  
Steven Michael Press

In recognizing more than just hyperbole in their critical studies of National Socialist language, post-war philologists Viktor Klemperer (1946) and Eugen Seidel (1961) credit persuasive words and syntax with the expansion of Hitler's ideology among the German people. This popular explanation is being revisited by contemporary philologists, however, as new historical argument holds the functioning of the Third Reich to be anything but monolithic. An emerging scholarly consensus on the presence of more chaos than coherence in Nazi discourse suggests a new imperative for research. After reviewing the foundational works of Mein Kampf (1925) and Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), the author confirms Klemperer and Seidel’s claim for linguistic manipulation in the rise of the National Socialist Party. Most importantly, this article provides a detailed explanation of how party leaders employed rhetorical language to promote fascist ideology without an underlying basis of logical argumentation.


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