German history is renowned for its peculiarities and paradoxes. The “land in the center of Europe,” with its constantly shifting boundaries, was also the land of Martin Luther (1483-1546), Ludwig van Beethoven (17701827), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (17491832), and Adolf Hitler (1889-1945). Although it is the Third Reich that is synonymous with the abuse of propaganda, consensus politics has largely remained absent from German political culture throughout its nondemo-cratic route to modernity. Indeed, the term “Germany” had no real political significance at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The numerous states of which it was comprised were loosely bound by their membership in the old Holy Roman Empire while retaining striking regional variations based more on political and cultural history than geography.
Medieval Germany under the Saxon and Salian dynasties was characterized by the feudal organization of society and politics, with the dominance of a military aristocracy. The revival of intellectual life was largely due to the church, with its monasteries and cathedral schools, many of which were revived in the tenth century. The mid-eleventh to the mid-twelfth century was a period of political conflict and religious strife. The great dynasties that were to leave their mark on German history emerged during this period. The aristocracy was essentially a warrior class that developed an elaborate code of honor that informed Middle High German art and literature toward the end of the twelfth century. Lyric poetry (Minnesang) gave expression to the ethos of the knightly class. Equally important, narrative poetry, in the form of the first German version of the Tristan and Isolde legend, dates from approximately 1170. Another category was the heroic epic, the most famous being the Nibelungenlied.
The period encompassing the end of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth is associated with the political legend of the great emperor Frederick Barbarossa (c. 1123—1190). For many nationalistic Germans of the nineteenth century this was viewed as the golden age of imperial greatness; propaganda techniques took the form of personal display, costume, and pageantry to disseminate the majesty of Frederick I and the development of courtly civilization. In the next three centuries, a series of changes took place that laid the foundation for modern Germany. In the late Middle Ages Germany remained politically decentralized and fragmented, with local princes assuming responsibility for maintaining peace and waging war within their principalities. This patchwork of dynastic and ecclesiastical territories was loosely held together by the wider protection of the Habsburg empire, whose dynastic possessions stretched from the Low Countries to Italy and Burgundy. Consensus politics was not a feature of the Germanic form of kingship, which was a limited monarchy. Propaganda had the dual role of proclaiming the great power of the emperor and obtaining allegiance to the feudal system at the local level.
From the mid-fourteenth to the mid-seventeenth century German society continued to be largely based on feudal agrarian principles. Political relations within the empire were subjected to an explosive new element in the form of the Reformation, which shattered European religious and cultural unity. The years 1525-1526 saw widespread revolts by peasants and common townspeople against the abuses of the existing system and notions of “godly law.” The German Reformation did not, however, foster the cause of wider German unity, leading to the enhancement of the powers of local rulers.
Germany thus entered the age of absolutism embodying a unique pattern of political multiplicity. Until its abolition under Napoleonic rule in 1806, the Holy Roman Empire actively encouraged the survival of small principalities at the expense of a centralized state. Broadsheets, illustrated manuscripts, and proclamations were employed to inculcate obedience and servility as subjects rather than as citizens. The emergence of Brandenburg-Prussia was of immense importance. In the nineteenth century Prussia would assume control of “small Germany” (Kleindeutschland) from an excluded Austria. Although one should avoid simplistic conclusions, the “enlightened absolutism” that emerged in Germany produced a literate, articulate public that separated the spheres of “power and spirit” (“Macht und Geist”) that sustained rather than challenged the existing status quo. Written and visual forms of political persuasion characterized German concepts of propaganda during this period; portraiture, political poems, tracts and treatises, as well as a growing body of political pam-phlets—although not on the same scale as in England—were all features of the political culture of the time.
The German Empire, or Second Reich, was created in 1871, founded on an unequal alliance between the national and liberal movements and the conservative Prussian state leadership. It has been stated that Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898), the Prussian chancellor, united Germany as a result of a series of successful military wars. However, closer examination reveals that the conditions for unification had been achieved before Bismarck came to power. The result of overt militarism, the creation of the German Empire appeared to have fulfilled Bismarck’s prediction of 1862 that Prussia would unite Germany by “blood and iron.” In fact, the empire was only established following numerous compromises and was immediately criticized for being incomplete. By and large, however, the majority warmly greeted the achievement of national unity. Following the euphoria of 1871, imperial Germany failed to adapt its institutions to the newly developing economic and social conditions. No firm parliamentary principle was established, such as the government’s responsibility to a sovereign parliament; rather, the situation was one of “government of the parties,” a system dubbed “chancellor dictatorship.” To this end, propaganda and the strict use of censorship, largely controlled by Bismarck and Prussia, continued to whip up nationalist fervor (Pan-Germanism) and stressed the economic advantages of political unity. Propaganda was employed to “sell” Bismarck’s social legislation to the whole world as an unrivaled model. In 1874 the Reichspressegesetz (Imperial Press Law) rationalized a highly fragmented regional press and provided the basis for a national legal framework. The law also abolished the practice of prepublication censorship (Vorzensur), although it retained postpublica-tion censorship (Nachzensur), which guaranteed that publications continued to be suppressed. Overcoming draconian state censorship was a problem, but the liberal press continued to attack the status quo and cartoons and caricature (notably in Simplicis-simus) were especially popular in satirizing political figures (although rarely the Emperor). Propaganda and persuasion continued to be seen as a means of influencing the masses rather than developing a dialogue or consensus. The bureaucratization and militarization of public life and an imperialist foreign policy, which stirred people’s emotions at home, bound nationalism and militarism with the monarchist authoritarian state.
With Bismarck’s resignation in 1890, Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859-1941) presented himself as the Volkskaiser (people’s Kaiser); idealized portraits of a statuesque Wilhelm obscured his insecurity and complex personality, masking his stunted body and withered arm from the public. The new policy of imperialism adopted by Wilhelm II represented a final attempt to overcome internal divisions through foreign policy successes. The kaiser’s motto remained: “Weltpolitik as a task; to become a world power as an aim; and the fleet [military force] as an instrument.”
The declaration of war in 1914 was apparently greeted with enthusiasm, and the political parties agreed to a truce (Burgfrieden). The nation appeared united behind the banner of a fully justified war of self-defense. Following the outbreak of war, the German government immediately surrendered to local army commanders extensive political powers over civil administration. General mobilization was accompanied by the proclamation of the Prussian Law of the Siege, which gave sole responsibility for public safety to the deputy commanding generals in each of the twenty-four army corps districts. The military attempted to solve the problem of coordinating propaganda through the Zivilversorgungsschein—penetrating civil society with military values.
The impression that emerges from the study of propaganda in the Great War is one of generally uncoordinated improvisation. By the end of the conflict, however, propaganda would for the first time be elevated to the position of a branch of government. It is ironic (in the light of later criticisms from right-wing nationalists) that of all the belligerents Germany had been the only power to pay serious attention to propaganda before 1914. For some years, and with considerable thoroughness, imperial Germany had been attempting to influence popular and official opinion in foreign countries. When war broke out in August 1914, Germany had a distinct advantage over the Allied governments in the field of propaganda. Germany had been developing a semiofficial propaganda network through her embassies, legations, consular offices, and branches of German banks and shipping companies—all of which acted as agents for the dissemination of literature favorable to the fatherland.
The “peculiarities” of German history led—although not inevitably—to Nazism. During the Weimar Republic the state continued to mingle in and control broadcasting. Ownership of the press was concentrated in the hands of the right-wing Hugenberg press empire, which greatly facilitated the rise of the National Socialists. When Hitler came to power, Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945) was appointed to head the Reichsministerium fur Volksaufklarung und Propaganda (Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda). It is not surprising that propaganda in Nazi Germany should have been considered important enough to warrant an entire government ministry; in Mein Kampf Hitler had stressed the importance of propaganda as a vehicle of political salesmanship in a mass market and laid down the broad lines along which Nazi propaganda was to operate. Indeed, the Nazi rise to power is often viewed as a classic example of political achievement by means of propaganda. The two most important ideas that distinguished the Nazis from other political parties and allowed Goebbels’s propaganda to mobilize widespread grievances were the notion of the Volksgemeinschaft (community of the people), based on the principle of the common good coming before the good of the community, and the myth of the charismatic Fuhrer. Once in power, Goebbels believed that propaganda was to play a central role and that the function of the new Propaganda Ministry was to coordinate the political will of the nation with the aims of the Nazi state. To this end he quickly set about monopolizing the means of communication by a process known as Gleichschaltung (coordination), which referred to the obligatory assimilation within the Nazi state of all political, economic, and cultural activities.
Propaganda in Nazi Germany was not, as is often thought, a “catchall” process. The “revolutionary” aim of the Nazi regime to bring about the Volksgemeinschaft, the true harmony of all classes, reflects the highly ambitious nature of its propaganda and its continuing success in maintaining its ideology and totalitarian vision. Terror always lurked behind such “consensus” and represented a real fear, but propaganda played a crucial role in securing at least passive support for the regime. After the grandiose edifice of the Third Reich was laid bare in 1945, the Nazi legacy resulted in a deep mistrust of propaganda throughout the world and a new awareness of how easily the mass media could be manipulated to serve the opportunistic purposes of their masters. Propaganda was not invented by Joseph Goebbels, although it is largely as a result of Nazi propaganda that the term has come to have such a pejorative connotation.
The official Nazi Party membership lapel pin: National-Sozialistische-D.A.P (National Socialist German Workers’ Party).
At the end of World War II the country was geographically truncated and politically divided into the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). The break with the past was symbolized by the concept of “Stunde Null” (zero hour) and the stress on renewal. The use made by the National Socialists’ propaganda machine had a profound influence on the early development of political cultures and media systems in the respective occupied zones. In the GDR a monolithic and oppressive system based on the Soviet model and the pervasive use of state censorship was instituted, while in the FRG allied “reeducation” placed political culture on a democratic and pluralistic basis.
The structure of the media system in the GDR was established on the principle of “democratic socialism.”At the pinnacle of this structure was the Politiburo of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), which directly controlled the Press Office of the Council of Ministers, which in turn presided over the State Radio and Television Committees. In 1971 an additional service called “Stimme der DDR” (Voice of the GDR) was established to provide a twenty-four-hour service mixing entertainment and information but aimed at a West German audience and broadcasting propaganda (the GDR counterpart to the FRG’s “Deutschlandfunk”). A youth channel (“Jugendradio 64″) was also established, and since the mid-1950s “Radio Berlin International” has provided short-wave service for international consumption. The press was similarly controlled; the SED party press consisted of two dailies (Neues Deutschland and Berliner Zeitung) and fourteen daily SED “district papers.”A state news agency, the All-gemeiner Deutscher Nachrichtendienst (AND), provided officially sanctioned news. In practice, however, the party never enjoyed an information monopoly. Most areas of the GDR received Western television and radio, and in the 1960s the authorities waged an unsuccessful campaign to counter West German broadcasts.
In the FRG the Allied occupation laid the basis for the resurrection of a strong press, freed from the threat of political oppression and abuse. It also had the effect of suppressing all other forms of discourse and concentrating the media in the hands of such giants as Axel Springer (1912-1985), who personified press power in the FDR. He was granted a license to launch a new radio-program magazine, Hor zu (Listen), in 1946. He founded the Hamburger Abendblatt two years later, and in June 1952 came the mass-appeal Bild Zeitung. In the following year he bought Die Welt from the British, who had established it as the mouthpiece of their military government in Germany. Springer also established a number of magazines and moved into commercial broadcasting. The right-wing political stance that the Springer media empire adopted beginning in the late 1950s led to an ongoing feud with the country’s intelligentsia. In West Germany the Allies were concerned that broadcasting should be decentralized. In 1954 the Arbeitsgemein-schaft der Offentlich-rechtlichen Rund-funkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (ARD; Working Group of the Public Broadcasting Corporations of the Federal Republic of Germany) was formed; consisting of eleven regional public broadcasting organizations, its mandate was to create national radio and television programs while drawing on the resources of regional stations. When the FRG gained full sovereignty in 1955, the federal states were granted full autonomy in broadcasting. The two foreign-language radio organizations operating under federal law are Deutsche Welle (DW; Voice of Germany; literally, German [Air] Wave) and Deutschland-funk (DL; Radio Germany). Both stations encountered Soviet jamming during the Cold War. Presently the DW’s radio broadcasts (which in 1993 took over the DL’s foreign-language programs for Europe) consist of ninety-three daily programs in thirty-four languages. In 1963 the Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF; Second [Channel of] German Television) went on the air; located outside Mainz, it is the largest single, centralized organization devoted to television programming and production in Europe. Since 1991 the ZDF has been entrusted with coordinating Europe’s cultural television channel, ARTE. Since 1992 Deutsche Welle TV has been broadcasting a magazine-type program fourteen hours each day via satellite, revealing the FRG’s commitment to keep a worldwide audience informed about German culture and politics.
The transformation of Germany into two very different states—one democratic and capitalistic, the other Communist—came to an end in October 1990 with the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the unification of the two Germanys. Unification took place very much on Western terms, and this applied to the mass media, where the new system had to conform to the regulatory framework and principles that had evolved in the FRG.
