In Audiences of Nazism, Ulrike Weckel argues that it is “both possible and fruitful to study audience reception even in a society with controlled media and no freedom of speech” (xi). In so doing, the twelve contributions here reveal how audience consent was manufactured through disagreement with the news but, crucially, not the terms in which it was framed (Janosch Steuwer, 84–103), or how those who later painted themselves as straightforward victims of Nazi propaganda had much more nuanced feelings about their treatment at the time (Bernhard Fulda, 177–195). Overall, the Nazi media environment presented in the volume was shaped by actors more numerous and indeed more important than propaganda “master” Joseph Goebbels. In this analysis, the display of Der Stürmer in public spaces and Fraktur typeface on concert programs mattered more for the social inclusion and exclusion of different groups than bombastic official pronouncements about favored media's role as, for example, “the eighth great power,” or its potential to effect “revolutionary” change. By focusing on audiences, moreover, this edited volume suggests that the main motor of Nazism was not necessarily fear and its corollary, compliance, but that Nazism instead gained much of its dynamism and ultimately sustained itself through the creative efforts of media producers and consumers in multiple venues over the lifespan of the regime. Indeed, in Peter Fritzsche's telling, Nazism itself relied upon an audience. When those who had echoed the regime's phrases back to them fell silent or switched off, then this hammered the final nail into Nazism's coffin (125).
This highly coherent edited volume brings together scholarship from Germany, Austria, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It will prove valuable to media scholars with a focus on the Second World War and revisionist scholars of propaganda more generally. Cultural historians will find a range of methods helpfully showcased over the volume's chapters, and historians of twentieth-century Germany will find some fresh approaches to longer running questions about how Nazism gained and maintained broader social legitimacy.
After a systematic and incisive introduction by Weckel, the first two chapters focus on newspapers. Jochen Hung reflects on how Weimar journalists came to understand themselves as out of touch with their readers, consequently attempting “to include readers in the production of newspaper content” or, perhaps less charitably, to pander to them (54). Either way, Hung argues that the initial gulf between reporters and readers is testament to the “limited influence of mass media” over its audiences at this period (49). In the following, stand-out chapter by Hannah Ahlheim, the author examines grassroots practices of constructing display cases for the fiercely antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer in public spaces around Germany, which contributed “to the demarcation of non-Jewish and Jewish spaces in towns and villages” (78). Ahlheim's innovation here is presenting the importance of “involuntary audiences” to these developments, showing how their behaviors (for example avoiding Jewish-run shops where they might be photographed and subsequently shamed in one of these “Stürmer boxes”) were qualitatively different from the activists maintaining these boxes, but no less important for “decisively alter[ing] the local social climate” (77).
The next two chapters focus on ego documents to understand how audiences consumed multiple media in Nazi Germany. Janosch Steuwer reflects on how a range of diarists reacted to press reports of the alleged “Röhm Putsch,” while Annina Hofferberth uses both diaries and letters to present a different picture of the Nuremberg Rallies to the one widely disseminated in Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935). Hofferberth neatly shows how diarists noted their excitement, endorsement, and even awe at aspects of the rallies but concludes ironically that the crowds elevated in Riefenstahl's film were in fact the cause of deep annoyance for locals trying to navigate the city at the time (107). She also points out how the images of uniformed Nazis behaving badly captured in diarists’ accounts were airbrushed out of official portrayals of the events (110).
The following two chapters could be grouped together as examining different modes of dialogue between various social groups in Nazi Germany. Peter Fritzsche argues that a National Socialist public was created and maintained through practices of “call and response”—most explicitly audible in Nazi sloganeering, but operating in more abstract ways too, and ultimately forming a “community of complicity” between the regime and “ordinary Germans” (121). If Fritzsche's argument that the causal chains created by such back and forth “remained in place for many, if not most, Germans well into the war years” (129) runs somewhat counter to the argument of the rest of the volume that one cannot extrapolate from certain audience experiences to speak for Germans as a whole, then his insistence that official Nazi media strategies fundamentally relied on audience interaction (rather than constituting one-way pronouncements from the top down) is well taken, and ably demonstrated here. Next, Pamela E. Swett focuses on advertising to show that the German media turned on more complex an axis than a straightforward regime/audience binary. Private firms also addressed potential customers throughout the Nazi period, sometimes seeking to mobilize consumers to exercise certain forms of pressure “upwards” on the regime (148).
Chapters Seven, Nine, and Ten might be grouped together in their analysis of media producers as simultaneous consumers of Nazi media. Each of the authors here deconstructs finished media products to understand how they were made and which tropes and, at times, directives were repurposed by their producers. Neil Gregor uses concert programs as his source base, while Michaela Scharf focuses on homemade Austrian movies recorded on the Autobahn. Lastly, Julia Torrie examines the role played by occupying soldiers in producing books and photographs in wartime France. The media forensics undertaken in these three chapters thoughtfully and fruitfully reveal the interpretive strategies of Nazism's audiences. This method does, however, privilege media producing classes, which is no bad thing in itself, to be sure, but does reflect the experiences, as Jochen Hung has pointed out here, of quite an elite and specific cohort. In this sense, Bernhard Fulda's examination of painter Emil Nolde's correspondence to understand audiences of the “Degenerate Art” exhibitions (Chapter Eight) also belongs in this subsection which showcases how cultural producers themselves interpreted and redeployed existing media tropes.
The last two chapters take a longue durée view, exploring how media produced by Nazi camp guards and the Allied forces who liberated concentration camps were repurposed over the postwar period. Bernhard Gross explores how tropes from the Allied produced “atrocity films” shown to postwar German audiences came to be appropriated, with “German cinema immediately after the war adapt[ing] the atrocity films’ images to express German experiences of suffering” (249). Ulrike Koppermann explores different editions of “an SS photo album” assembled from images of Auschwitz, exploring “the interpretive framework within which [each edition] conveyed the photographs to the public” (262). She therefore reconstructs different editors’ commemorative strategies, analyzing too reviewers’ sense of the “appropriateness” of these decisions. The last two chapters show, most basically, the enduring relevance of media produced during the Nazi period (and therefore that being an “audience of Nazism” does not necessarily belong to the historical past). More than any others in the volume, however, they take the Nazi period as their starting point to the detriment of earlier referents. This framing is perhaps another (albeit less personalized) way of overstating the paradigm-changing power of Nazi-period media on its audiences, which is something this collective volume does so well overall at challenging.
Who are the audiences of Nazism profiled here? Some of the contributors differentiate them along lines of class, with the concertgoing public in Gregor's chapter and the car- and camera-owning vacationers in Scharf's chapter being defined as largely urban middle class. Party affiliation also forms a means by which audiences are grouped. As Jochen Hung shows here, though, if this were the matrix according to which partisan newspaper editors understood their audiences, those same editors were in for a shock when it turned out that party politics did not, in fact, straightforwardly shape how one conceived of the news. Hannah Ahlheim's chapter is so nuanced because it assesses how the cohabitation of members of distinct municipalities with different ethnic backgrounds altered on account of media practices in these towns, while avoiding essentialist ideas that different ethnic groups approached media in different, ethnically determined, ways. Ahlheim's chapter opens the door to a broader discussion of how those who were not recognized as part of the German Volksgemeinschaft used Nazi media too, recognizing their power, agency, and participation—“involuntary” or otherwise. Her chapter might be taken as a starting point to think about how, for example, the large numbers of East Europeans working in the Reich and living elsewhere around Nazi occupied Europe might count as meaningful “audiences of Nazism” too.
No matter how they are categorized, however, the authors of this volume push back against the idea that one can find a “representative sample” when it comes to media users. If this at first seems to foreclose the possibility of drawing any larger conclusions about the social uses of media in the Third Reich, then, at second glance, we can see better—through an examination of media—just how society at this period actually worked. Media users were not passive, and the Nazi Reich was full of them. If Nazi media has often been understood through the metaphor of the “people's receiver” or its more colorful synonym, “Goebbel's snout,” then this volume presents us instead with Nazi media as a collage, produced by different hands, necessarily on the basis of earlier tropes. As a number of contributors to the volume remind us, this is what any page of a newspaper or a concert program amounts to in the first place, rather than the sole work of any one individual—no matter how protuberant their snout.
