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‘Totalitarian Humour’?: National Socialist Propaganda and Active Audiences in Entertainment

What are the dynamics of communication in authoritarian systems and dictatorships? For a long time historians were drawn to simple models of stimulus and response: the dictator speaks and the people react. But in recent years, it has been repeatedly pointed out that propaganda, like any form of communication, runs in two directions. Every given transmitter observes the reactions of the recipients; hence the recipient is also a transmitter, and propaganda needs to be understood as a circular process of reciprocal reactions. 1 Above all, propaganda involves the will to build a particularly intense relationship with consumers of media content. One might even argue that the observational attention of the transmitter is much more intense under totalitarian conditions than under democratic forms of government. In any case, many have suggested that terms such as ‘totalitarianism’, ‘Gleichschaltung’ (synchronization of media), or even ‘propaganda’ should be used only in quotation marks. These terms express a desire to control rather than providing an accurate description of communication processes or structures in the public sphere. 2 There is still a strong if not prevailing historiographical tendency to highlight the persuasive forces of National Socialist propaganda and take the propagandists’ phantasies of total control for granted. 3 However the recent orientation of German historiography towards the ‘Volksstaat’ (people’s state) and ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ (national/ethnic community) has stimulated a new interest in the co-operation of individuals and their commitment to the National Socialist state. 4 Only when it comes to the analysis of mass media do historians continue to focus on political staging, as it seems hard to detect the involvement of individuals in ‘co-producing’ media content. 5 Approaches which heed the theoretical insight that communication is circular are more likely to be found in Anglo-American scholarship, where they draw on a long tradition of engagement with popular culture. They underline the consensual character of most political processes, including the production of entertainment, and explain the indisputable attraction of the regime by its ability to meet popular demands. 6 In his