Transnational Propaganda and National Media Cultures in Weimar Political Thought

Abstract

Abstract This contribution analyses the discourse on propaganda during the Weimar Republic as a medium of transnational self-positioning and identity construction. The perception of mass media modernism in the 1920s was deeply shaped by the world war, and the concept of ‘propaganda’ dominated reflection on it. Early reviews of the propaganda war revolved around the question of how Germany could regain its former world-power status through propaganda. Two transnational propaganda campaigns are examined in closer detail: the German struggle against the Versailles ‘war-guilt clause’ and the fight against the Allied occupation of the Ruhr. They illustrate how exaggerated expectations of the power of propaganda were accompanied by conceptual ambiguities and inconsistencies. One important reason for this simultaneity was that Germans discussed propaganda in the light of national media cultures and constructed it as alien to the German nature. Many authors distinguished supposedly genuinely German values such as ‘truthfulness’, decency and profundity from the values of other national cultures, simultaneously complaining that Germany was struggling harder in the field of propaganda than other countries because of this deep-seated disposition. Such national auto-stereotypes extended into the scholarly study of propaganda, making it difficult to conceptualize it as a phenomenon of modern mass communication. The Germans’ ambivalent relationship to propaganda was also evident in politics: while the Weimar governments displayed uneasiness towards propaganda, the Nazi movement called for its unscrupulous use. In this way, the Nazis not only prepared for the destruction of democracy, but also stood for a different understanding of ‘Germanness’.