Search results

Was there a Nazi brand? -- The marketing managers of the Third Reich : a chaos theory of government -- Operational : impelementing the nazi brand -- Promotion : political marketing communication-- the ministry of illusion -- Product : Adolf Hitler, the Ersatz Kaiser -- Packaging : the politics of consumption and the consumption of politics -- Place : political marketing channels, the entrepreneurship of the public space -- Legacy : the implications of the nazi brand -- Hitler our contemporary : brand heritage, the reich as power brand -- Was Adolf Hitler ahead of his time? : a review of comparative self-presentation -- Epilogue: the Führer and the Donald : the ghost of a resemblance?

A radical reappraisal of how Hitler and the Nazis conceived of themselves from the outset as a propagandistic state, rather than propaganda being merely an accessory to power. 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 dêtre, the medium through which power itself was exercised. Moreover, Nicholas OShaughnessy 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 citys 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.--

Abstract
This article (while emphatic in stressing the absence of any political or ethical connection between two recent governments, those of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, and one historic one, the genocidal empire of Adolf Hitler), argues that the Nazi regime did in fact anticipate many communications methods pursued subsequently. The Nazis sponsored a communications revolution. The conscious production of political imagery and tableaux, government via symbolic strategies, the rhetoricizing of civic culture and the centrality of the rhetorical vision, all these have become part of our political truth as well as the Nazis'. Such a reality, then as now, is underpinned by spin, rapid rebuttal, duplicity and the construction of a nirvana of statistics and benevolent data. The ultimate fate of all these regimes was bound up with an ethos of government that placed symbolism centre‐ stage; a parallel universe of imagery and symbolism is no basis on which to construct an edifice of permanence. The methodologies of these regimes do sustain comparison, the ends, of course, do not.
Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.