Jacob Lewis
Ms. Andrews
English 1102
28 November 2012
January 30th, 1933, the
day Adolf Hitler was elected the Chancellor of Germany spelled the doom for millions
of people. While many inspiring and dramatic battles were waged
across the fields of Europe and the islands of the Pacific, there was something
darker happening in the shadows of the Third Reich. Nazi Germany was trying to
systematically destroy many races of people that they thought were “less
desirable.” Today we call these actions The Holocaust, and the main targets
during this were the Jews. Hitler and his higher ups used the Jews as a
scapegoat for all of the misfortunes that had befallen Germany after the First
World War.
How was the
German government able to justify the killings of millions of peoples including
six million plus Jews? How did they receive the support from the populace to do
all of these terrible things or how did they make the people of German believe
and think in the same way that the government did? They accomplished all of
this through their mastery of language through propaganda. They used many means of propaganda that can
all be divided into two types, visual propaganda, and auditory propaganda.
Learning about how the Nazis used propaganda to make people feel same way and
agree on certain topics can play a vital role in today’s time. The Nazis had a very
effective way of communicating their ideals, and through studying their
techniques, modern day advertisers can modify old techniques to make them
relevant to today’s products. Now even
though both types of propaganda were used by the Nazis, what type was the most
effective? Based on the evidence that I have found in my research I believe
that the use of auditory propaganda was more useful for the Nazis than the
visual propaganda was.
What first
interested me in this topic was an old project that I had been given my
freshman year in high school. In my World History class everyone was given a
certain topic to research from World War Two. My topic was on Kristallnacht or
“Night of Glass”, where all the Jewish owned businesses in Berlin were broken
into, looted, and outright destroyed. At first I didn’t really care about any
of that stuff because it was just another stupid paper I had to write, but now
that I have grown up and can appreciate the skill and work it took to make
citizens of a country hate a certain group of people so much they would
outright attack and destroy all the businesses ran by that group in a major
city like Berlin. There must have been some powerful sort of propaganda that
caused all these people to come together to hate these ordinary people, people
who had been their friends and neighbors for years, enough to attack them.
To start
off, my first example that proves auditory was a more power from of propaganda
than visual, was that Hitler and the Nazi party would have many rallies in the
large cities around German. The main points of interests at these rallies were
the speeches that were given usually by Hitler himself or other Nazi leaders.
Hitler would always get up in front of large crowds of people and would talk,
and his speeches were very powerful because of the rhetoric and the emotion
that he had. People would travel great distances to come and hear the Führer speak. In his speeches we usually
talked about the greatness of Germany before the First World War and how bad
the state was now, which brought about great pride for the old times and
distraught for the new times. These
rallies also show how auditory propaganda was more important because of the
role that the visual propaganda played. These rallies that were always held in
these gigantic amphitheaters would show off the power of the Nazi Government.
These big stadiums along with the hundreds of large Nazi swastika flags and
banner would all boast about how big and mighty the government is. But, all of
these visual pieces of propaganda served only a supporting role. The visual
propaganda was there to build up Hitler’s ethos, so that his speeches would
seem more credible and believable. This
proves that the auditory was more important than the visual, because the visual
was only there to help build up the auditory propaganda.
Another idea
that proves that auditory propaganda was more important than visual propaganda
is from my own experiences. When I see a picture or a poster I look at it and
go “Oh that’s a nice piece of work,” but when I hear something I have to stop
and listen so that I understand. With a picture I could stop and look at it,
maybe take it so that later I could really focus on certain things and analyze
it all the way through, but that would take some time to do.
Although, when I hear something I have to stop right then and focus onto it so
that I don’t miss anything. While with a picture you can take you time to focus
on certain things, when you hear something you have to start actively listening
and focusing on the main topics and the supporting details. Because the human
brain has to more quickly filter out the non essential information when you
hear something compared to when you see it, you have to become more engaged to
listening than seeing. Also, based off of the finding from an fMRI study on the
McGurk effect, what you hear can modify what you visually
perceive (Jones).For example there are these certain pictures, like my
favorite, the pictures of the two ladies, which are used in psychology that
when they asked people what they saw they got two totally different answers.
This is because everyone’s perception is different. When a group of people were
told what the picture was before the picture was shown to them, they all saw
the same thing. This is because they were already mentally creating the picture
in their head before they saw it. The same thing was true about another group
that was told the opposite answer. Groups of people can be persuaded to see
different things in the same thing, which just shows that auditory language can
control how someone perceives visual language.
Your brain acts in very specific
ways. Not only does it filter out non-essential information, it can also react
to certain key words or feelings (Pizzaro.)
By hearing some more pleasant words”like soft, pillow, fuzzy”, and such other words,
your brain creates a feeling of comfort because it relates those things as
being comfortable. The same is true for the opposite set of words. If
disgusting words are used to describe something then in turn that makes the
thing being described disgusting. This technique was use by the Nazis, and can
be seen her in a quote from Hitler, “...the
personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape
of the Jew. -Adolf Hitler
(Mein Kampf)”( Adolf Hitler about the Jews.) By placing cacophonous words
near or beside Jew in a sentence, the Nazis used language to bring about
feelings of hate and fear towards the Jews. While this could also be done on
visual pieces of propaganda, the ability to keep repeating this technique over
and over again throughout a speech would make its use in auditory propaganda
far exceed that of visual propaganda.
What I
believe to be the one thing that made auditory propaganda the most influential
is the development of the radio and radio systems. During the Nazi control of
Germany the head of Propaganda, Josef Goebbels, organized the effort that
helped provide cheap radios for sale to the general public. These radios came
in two different sizes a large and small version for sale at seventy-six and
thirty-five Marks respectively. He also used his power in the government to
have loud speakers installed in cities across the country. He believed that
when Hitler spoke that everyone in the country should be able to listen to him
(Trueman). This new technology sparked the interest of the public and the
government alike. Just like today with the all new iPads and tablets, everything
you did, play or watched had advertisements for some political party or the
other. The development of new technology has always seem to get the interest of
lots of people, and advertisement works best when lots of people are already
open to new ideas.
In summary, the
speeches Nazi leaders gave, personal experiences on how the brain works, how
the brain reacts to certain words and the feeling it makes, and the new
technology of the radio are all examples of why auditory propaganda was more
effective than visual propaganda. Through researching and analyzing past
examples of powerful propaganda we can learn some effective advertising tips.
Although Nazi propaganda and modern advertising is very different we can still
use some old techniques with new modification to make some very persuasive ads
for today. Anyone that wants to analyze or learn how to sway people to believe
or buy something can learn from looking at how the Nazis used language to make
a whole country believe the ideals of a few.
Sources
"Adolf
Hitler about the Jews." Jewish
Upps. Mosaisk.com. Web. 27 Nov 2012.
<http://www.mosaisk.com/auschwitz/Adolf-Hitler-about-the-Jews.php>.
Jones, Jeffery.
"Brain activity during audiovisual speech perception: An fMRI study of the
McGurk effect."NeuroReport. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 11
2003. Web. 27 Nov 2012.
<http://journals.lww.com/neuroreport/Abstract/2003/06110/Brain_activity_during_audiovisual_speech.6.asp&xgt;.
Pizzaro, David.
"5 fascinating findings on how disgust affects the way we vote, grocery
shop and discriminate."TED Blog. TED, 23 2012. Web. 18 Nov 2012.
<http://blog.ted.com/2012/10/23/5-fascinating-findings-on-how-disgust-effects-the-way-we-vote-grocery-shop-and-discriminate/>.
Trueman, Chris.
"History Learning Site." History
Learning Site. (2012): n. page. Web. 18 Nov. 2012.
<http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/propaganda_in_nazi_germany.htm>.
Reflection for the Inquiry Paper
This paper was actually a pretty easy paper to write. I know
a lot of people in my class was struggling to find information and then finally
writing the paper but I actually found the writing of the paper to be very
easy. This is probably because I already knew some things on my topic and most
of my research was only building on that foundation. All in all I actually did
learn a lot from this paper, and I liked the format. Being able to use personal
experiences and things for a research paper and putting my own personal
argument into it made it so much better than all of those other boring papers I
had to write in high school. I wouldn’t mind writing more argumentative papers
in the future, but only if they had a topic that was less… language based.
No comments:
Post a Comment