Living as we do in an era of profound, wrenching changes in the media landscape, Corey Ross's book on mass media from Kaiserreich to Third Reich seems particularly relevant to present-day concerns, while it also contributes to our understanding of Weimar culture and the Nazi rise to power. Though this story has been told in bits and pieces in various places, Ross brings this research together in this work of synthesis and presents us with a new, coherent interpretation of the whole. His study encompasses an unusually broad range of media and forms of popular culture (not only newspapers, magazines, film, and radio, but also sound recordings, live performances, and advertising). He casts aside facile assumptions about media history: that the rise of mass media brought about democratization, or dictatorship, or cultural homogeneity, or the decline of class distinctions. Instead, he shows that mass media can have different impacts in different historical situations.
The late nineteenth century saw the emergence of media—mass circulation dailies, illustrated magazines, film, and sound recordings—whose primary goal was to entertain the masses and turn a profit. They were depicted by critics as a danger to Kultur and Bildung—German ideals of culture and education tied to the Enlightenment tradition and associated with the more traditional, elite-dominated media. It was feared that the cheap thrills and instant gratification of cinema and pulp fiction would unleash dangerous passions that would undermine the spiritual fiber and self-discipline of the nation.
Moral crusaders often came out on top in the cultural wars of the era around 1900, but could not halt the rise of popular culture. Even during World War I, when censorship reached its peak, the burning desire of the masses to be distracted from wartime hardships undermined attempts at draconian crackdowns. Once the war ended, “the people hurled themselves upon the long-awaited pleasure like a pack of hungry wolves,” in the words of a Berlin newspaper (p. 74). But the urge to control was strong. In the ensuing, Weimar-era “moral panic” (p. 75), dance halls, smutty literature, and other popular pleasures were subjected to restrictions.
While attempts to control media from above (through censorship or educational endeavors) were largely unsuccessful in the Weimar era, popular influence on the media greatly increased. Cinema and print journalism responded to the popular thirst for entertainment. Nevertheless, class and regional differences persisted. And attempts on the left and right to overcome the dichotomy of E-Kunst (serious art) and U-Kunst (entertainment) by creating a middlebrow culture that would help to unify the German people were not very successful before 1933.
The emergence of the “new sensual landscape of popular culture” (p. 244) set the stage for the massive propaganda efforts of the enemies of the Weimar Republic. Since the late nineteenth century, German intellectuals had helped to develop the modern conception of propaganda, tying it to the idea of the rise of the “masses,” who were led, not by rational thought, but by emotions. With the emergence of the “stab-in-the-back” legend after World War I, most Germans became convinced that the war had been lost, not because of military events, but because the government had mishandled propaganda, and thus the masses. The discussion of modern, “scientific” advertising contributed to Weimar-era ideas about the necessity of political propaganda. Nonetheless, defenders of the Weimar Republic made only weak attempts to use propaganda to shore up support for democracy, partly because they thought that the enemies of the republic would have to be granted equal time, partly because they viewed Nazi-style propaganda methods with distaste. The Nazis made better use of propaganda techniques than their opponents.
Ross nonetheless deflates the notion that Nazi Germany was “the modern era's first full-blown media culture” (p. 265). He presents a good deal of evidence that the Nazis were more imitators than innovators. As in other countries, media concentration was a response to the weak economic position of media companies, hurt by the Depression. The Nazi “promise of consumption and pleasure” (p. 306) was a response to the development of an international consumer culture; Germany was merely catching up with other nations (going on, during World War II, to destroy other nations' ability to enjoy consumerism). The Nazis learned much from American advertising methods, applying them to the marketing of the Führer himself. And the Volksempfänger, the famous Nazi radio, turns out to have been no more than the outgrowth of private industry's drive to create cheap, standardized products. (Its inability to receive foreign broadcasts was not ideologically mandated, but the result of economic and technological factors, according to recent research.) Ross asserts that “much of what constituted ‘Nazi mass culture’ would have come about anyway” (p. 388).
Some have argued that what was particularly innovative about Nazi media policies was the way they were able to harness popular entertainment for the purposes of the dictatorship, while preserving the appearance of apolitical diversion. When Zarah Leander sang “Es wird einmal ein Wunder geschehen … daß wir uns wiedersehen” in 1942, she both entertained and encouraged Germans not to give up the fight. In fact, though, the most popular films of the Nazi era were highly derivative, inspired in large part by Hollywood and Weimar (minus the social criticism). More overtly political (and original, not to mention modernist) films, such as those of Leni Riefenstahl, were far less popular. Similarly, newspapers, magazines, and the radio became more strongly geared toward entertainment. At the same time that entertainment was subtly politicized, politics was turned into a form of entertainment, thanks not only to the pageantry of Albert Speer's designs, but also to American-style use of advertising methods.
Ross asserts that this mixing of entertainment and politics undermined official agendas: “people could often get what they wanted out of the popular-culture offerings of the Third Reich, gladly ‘plundering’ them without necessarily taking the intended political messages on board” (p. 307). Even wartime newsreels and military documentaries “enthralled” audiences (p. 350), becoming a new form of entertainment, one that was not always believed. His thesis of audience autonomy wears somewhat thin in his discussion of those films that combined entertainment and propaganda, such as the incredibly popular, viciously anti-Semitic Jüd Süß. Evidence is unfortunately sparse, but here—as throughout the book—Ross makes an admirable effort to discuss audience and reader reactions. He is on much more solid ground in his assertion that the war swept aside elitism and brought about a profoundly “populist” (p. 361) recasting of film, radio, and the press. In the early war years, these media contributed to the sense of belonging to a national community. Later in the war, however, trust in the media declined, and Germans turned increasingly to escapist entertainment and foreign media, the BBC in particular. Before that late phase, the Nazis succeeded, where the Weimar Republic had failed, in overcoming the divides of class, milieu, and region. But “the remarkable ability of the mass media to integrate audiences in the Third Reich was predicated not only on social assimilation but also on exclusion and repression” (p. 386). Indeed, entertainment was not just a diversion, but in fact an integral part of the “good life” and “joy” (p. 387) that racial triumph and conquest would secure. Ross blanches at the thought that this program could be termed truly modern.
One shortcoming of Ross's analysis is that he (like many authors) rigidly equates popular culture with entertainment, whereas educational ideals are, in his mind, elitist. It is quite believable that attempts to promote bourgeois cultural hegemony over the working class prepared the way for dictatorship; however, it is much more problematic to place, as Ross does, cultural reform and the ideal of educating and culturally lifting the average person in the same authoritarian tradition. Ross is also at times too quick to dismiss high culture as elitist and unpopular with the great majority of the population, for example overlooking the popularity of cross-over artists, such as singers who sang both popular (or traditional) and classical music, including Beniamino Gigli (a favorite of Mussolini but also popular in Germany) and the Vienna Boys' Choir. The concept of Germany as a Kulturnation extended far beyond the bourgeoisie, thanks in part to the pedagogical efforts of the labor and socialist movements (which Ross discusses in some depth, but ultimately dismisses as failed, top-down initiatives).
It is also possible that Ross would have fared better if he had framed this as a study about popular culture rather than media history. Integrating debates about popular culture into the conceptual framework of the book would have focused attention on the question (not addressed in any consistent way) of the complex relationship between political authorities, elites, and media consumers. Placing media history in the center of his analysis leads to banal and overly general questions and conclusions, as well as an overemphasis on structures as opposed to discourses. This critique should not, however, be construed as calling into question the great value of this study. Detailed, engaging, and well structured, it engages the critically thinking reader in a lively conversation. Ross has considerably advanced debates about German media and popular culture in the Imperial, Weimar, and Nazi eras.
