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Introduction A pastor who lived through the Third Reich described his meetings with Nazi officials in a way that illuminates life in totalitarian societies: “[O]ne would be pushed further, step by step, until he had crossed over the line, without noticing that his spine was being bent millimeter by millimeter.”1 The Nazis he met with knew that persuasion is a gradual process with many methods. Just after Nikita Khrushchev’s famous speech that revealed some of Stalin’s depravity, Johannes R. Becher, author of the GDR’s national anthem and minister of culture, wrote a poem that remained unpublished until 2000. It was titled “Burnt Child”: He who has had his spine broken Is hardly to be persuaded To stand up straight. The memory of the broken spine Terrifies him. Even when the break Has long since healed, And there is no longer any danger Of breaking his spine.2 The poem may be a confession. In any event, it was published only long after Becher’s death. National Socialism and Marxism-Leninism put enormous effort into bending, and sometimes breaking, spines—a process for which both found propaganda necessary. The two German systems differ in many ways. One is the mark of vivid evil, the other leaves images of gray old men in colorless cities. The Nazi villain is a regular in film and fiction. Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) is the quintessential propaganda film. The GDR left nothing that makes evil as striking. GDR writer Volker Braun once called it “the most boring country on earth.”3 Some agree with Margherita von Brentano that “the mere comparison of the Third Reich with the GDR is a dreadful oversimplification. The Third Reich left mountains of corpses. The GDR left mountains of files.”4 The differences between the systems should not be ignored but neither should the similarities. Both used propaganda to attempt to build new 1 societies in which people were to share almost unanimously a common worldview of religious proportions, what some today call a hegemonic metanarrative, with little room for opposing versions of truth. Both greatly reduced opportunities for open discourse, rendering it difficult and perhaps even impossible for them and their citizens to correct the evils their governments caused. The extent to which the propagandas of two systems close in time and rooted in the same history and culture, yet widely varying in ideology, are similar or different will say something about the larger nature of propaganda in the modern world. But what is this thing called propaganda? There are about as many definitions as there are writers. F. M. Cornford has my favorite—“The art of very nearly deceiving one’s friends without quite deceiving one’s enemies”—but that is not a practical definition. Part of the problem is that there are conflicting views of propaganda.5 Western democracies have feared propaganda and at least in public oppose it. To call someone a propagandist is an insult. Propaganda is seen as a manipulative tool of dictatorships . The foreign propaganda branch of the U.S. government is called the United States Information Agency, and it is prohibited from broadcasting to the United States itself for fear that propaganda masquerading as information could have an untoward effect at home. Propaganda was also suspect in Germany before the Nazi takeover. A scholarly book published in 1924 began with these words: “Even the word propaganda sounds very unpleasant to us Germans.”6 Propaganda was widely seen as something the deceitful Allies had used to deceive honest Germans, a belief encouraged by arguments that Germany lost World War I because it had been “stabbed in the back” by traitors at home. The great dictatorships of the twentieth century took a different view. To them, propaganda was a necessary and beneficial phenomenon. The Nazis established a state Ministry for People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda (RMVP) under Joseph Goebbels. The GDR handled propaganda from party offices. Both, however, built comprehensive systems to influence public opinion and behavior. Social progress depended on new evangelists or social technicians, particularly the propagandists. The Nazis went so far as to defend the reputation of propaganda by trying to restrict the term to their activities. A 1942 injunction to Nazi propagandists ordered them to guard the word’s good name: “The term propaganda should be used only in a positive sense and only for propaganda coming from Germany.” The word “agitation” was to be used for 2 Introduction [18.117.196...

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