Description
Book SynopsisHitler 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'etre, 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 communiques, 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.
Trade Review'A fascinating work on how the Nazis "sold" Hitler to the German people and vice-versa, almost like a modern commercial brand.' * Evening Standard (Best Books of 2016) *
'Illuminatingly treats the Third Reich's deployment of myths, symbols, and rhetoric with the eye and ear of a theorist keenly tuned to the subtle plays of power and desire within the manufacture of the "spiritual-religious idea" that is Nazism ... A fresh take on an area of scholarship dominated by historians, Selling Hitler teems with insight.' * Los Angeles Review of Books *
'[A] fresh, surprising and important look at a neglected aspect of the history of Nazi Germany. […] O'Shaughnessy boldly deconstructs the Nazi propaganda machine and its vast output.' * Jewish Journal *
