Selling Hitler: Propaganda and the Nazi Brand

by Nicholas O'Shaughnessy

Overview

Hitler was one of the few politicians who understood that persuasion was everything, deployed to anchor an entire regime in the confections of imagery, rhetoric and dramaturgy. The Nazis pursued propaganda not just as a tool, an instrument of government, but also as the totality, the raison d'être, the medium through which power itself was exercised. Moreover, Nicholas O'Shaughnessy argues, Hitler, not Goebbels, was the prime mover in the propaganda regime of the Third Reich - its editor and first author. Under the Reich everything was a propaganda medium, a building-block of public consciousness, from typography to communiqués, to architecture, to weapons design. There were groups to initiate rumours and groups to spread graffiti. Everything could be interrogated for its propaganda potential, every surface inscribed with polemical meaning, whether an enemy city's name, an historical epic or the poster on a neighbourhood wall. But Hitler was in no sense an innovator - his ideas were always second-hand. Rather his expertise was as a packager, fashioning from the accumulated mass of icons and ideas, the historic debris, the labyrinths and byways of the German mind, a modern and brilliant political show articulated through deftly managed symbols and rituals. The Reich would have been unthinkable without propaganda - it would not have been the Reich.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781787381032
Publisher:	Hurst
Publication date:	09/01/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	593 KB

About the Author

Nicholas O'Shaughnessy (PhD) is Professor of Communication at Queen Mary, University of London. He studied at Cambridge, Oxford and Columbia universities and among his many publications are The Marketing Power Of Emotion (OUP) and The Phenomenon of Political Marketing (Macmillan).

Table of Contents

Preface Introduction PART ONE NARRATIVES AND THEORIES 1. A Narrative of Third Reich Propaganda (1920-39): Imagining the Reich 2. A Narrative of Third Reich Propaganda: Ersatz Valhalla (1939-45) 3. Towards a Nazi Theory of Persuasion: The Primal Scream of Fascism PART TWO A PROPAGANDA TRINITY 4. Mythologies: Inventing the Third Reich 5. Symbolism: A Language that Lies Deeper than Language 6. Rhetoric: Words that Think for You Conclusions Propaganda, the Light of Perverted Science Notes Index

Editorial Reviews

"A fresh take on an area of scholarship dominated by historians, Selling Hitler teems with insight into the subtle ways in which a subliminally reinforced political message can become consciously internalized and defended by well-intentioned citizens." —Los Angeles Review of Books

"A fresh, surprising and important look at a neglected aspect of the history of Nazi Germany."—Jewish Journal

"A fascinating work on how the Nazis "sold" Hitler to the German people and vice-versa, almost like a modern commercial brand."— Andrew Roberts, Evening Stand-ard (Best Books of the Year edition)

"Selling Hitler is a thorough, bitter, and entirely virtuoso performance, ranging fluently over all the various mechanisms by which the Nazi propaganda apparatus attempted to create the idea of a nationalist paradise just out of reach, deliverable only by the new order."—Open Letters Monthly

"[A] magisterial work... a methodical study of propaganda, mass media and market-ing." — The Times of Israel

"This intriguing study of propaganda, mass media and marketing is a most welcome addition to the literature of the Third Reich." — Giles MacDonogh, author of On Germany

"This book is a powerful reassertion of the centrality of propaganda in the Nazi regime. O'Shaughnessy's emphasis on the manipulation of symbols, the selective appropriation of history, and on the Nazi colonisation of language is particularly to be welcomed." — Toby Thacker, Senior Lecturer in Modern European History, Cardiff University, and author of Joseph Goebbels: Life and Death

From the Publisher