Josef Goebbels collected the ideas about the propaganda that Adolf Hitler poured into my fight and expanded them throughout the twelve years in which he held the position of Reichsminister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, from coming to power in 1933 to the fall of Berlin. Joachim Lang, director of The propaganda minister, which hits theaters this week, recalls that “Goebbels was the one who created Hitler’s public image. In addition to being a great orator, he was also very innovative when it came to using all the means at his disposal: his famous Total War speech, which we see him prepare in the film, was a great multimedia event. First there was his captive audience at the Sports Palace, then he selected what reached the press and radio, which were also under his control, to finally project other parts of the speech, in the form of a newsreel, in the cinemas.
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The film is a brilliant artifact that combines archival images, some truly chilling – such as the corpses of Goebbels’ children, murdered by their parents in Hitler’s bunker – and historical reconstruction by actors playing the main Nazi leaders. , to clarify the context in which the images created and distributed during the Third Reich were conceived: “I wanted to deconstruct those images that have gone down in history as documentaries, and to do so I had to create a fiction with actors. It was the only way to get closer to reality than the news programs of the time.” The propaganda minister It is particularly timely today, when the extreme right has managed to prevail in half the world thanks to the dissemination of hoaxes, in clear line of continuity with the philosophy of the person to whom the sentence is attributed: “a lie repeated a thousand times becomes a lie.” TRUE”. Although the authorship of this phrase repeated more than a million times was never proven, it perfectly summarizes the Goebbels doctrine. As Joachim Lang states, he was “the creator of fake news. When news arrived of defeats or atrocities committed by the Germans, he usually chose to exaggerate and multiply those of the opposing camp. He was very flexible, he knew how to adapt to his audience. The Germans did not want another war, but he knew how to prepare them to accept it. First with entertaining films, and then, at the right moment, launching another one about Mongol attacks. And if he encountered a public that resisted propaganda, as when he was appointed gauleiter of Berlin, then he did not hesitate to resort to violence. Violence was always his Plan B.”
“They triumphed with the same formula that Trump and Musk are applying right now”
One of the most innovative aspects of The propaganda minister is that both Joseph Goebbels (played by Robert Stadlober) and Adolf Hitler (Fritz Karl), and the rest of the Nazi clique, appear as extremely banal characters. Lang explains that “we have become accustomed to Nazis being represented in films in a very unfriendly way to create a distance in the viewer. This strategy distances us from reality, and prevents us from understanding why our ancestors followed Hitler.” Demonizing the Nazis is counterproductive, also because it paralyzes us: “It is better to see them as criminals, as Thomas Mann did; That implies that it is up to us to prevent them from committing their crimes.”
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In the same way, the best-known part of Hitler’s speeches are his explosions of anger, which were nothing more than the climax of an oratory that could last more than an hour using very different tones: “if we listen to an entire speech by Hitler or Goebbels, we see how well thought out they were to project their charisma as a form of seduction. Last year I presented a speech by Hitler from 1933 at a literature festival, and it didn’t talk about killing the Jews, it seemed like a social program. He was very seductive, which is why it is important to look closely at people like Giorgia Meloni or Marine Lepen. At first glance they don’t look bad, but they are wolves in sheep’s clothing. “My film talks about the past to draw attention to the present, because today’s populists have many more means to seduce the masses.”
Joachim Lang
The propaganda minister premieres shortly after The Vanguard, among other means, they have abandoned the social network formerly known as Twitter so as not to contribute their traffic to what has become an ultra propaganda platform, following Goebbels’ precepts, such as repeating the same slogans thousands of times to shape public opinion. , which is achieved by creating thousands of fake accounts. “With artificial intelligence it is much easier because it is about simplifying and repeating. Goebbels triumphed with the same formula that Trump and Musk are applying right now. The ultra-German AfD party, which triumphed in the last Thuringia elections, is very present on TikTok. It is important to decipher propaganda strategies to unmask today’s demagogues. Only then can people realize how they try to manipulate public opinion. This is what I have tried to do in my film, showing how Goebbels organized everything, taking crowds to certain places, putting the most handsome people in the foreground and a girl giving a bouquet of flowers. Everything to create images. “We have seen it in the Palestine war, and we have seen it with Trump, when he tried to create an image with his attack.”
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One of the ironies of the legacy of Nazi propaganda could be that, in a 180-degree turn, criticism of the Israeli government has come to be described as anti-Semitic from the most extreme poles of the right: “It is horrible to use the Holocaust to justify far-right politics. But it is the propaganda strategy of those who defend Netanyahu’s policy. “Criticism of the Israeli government must be differentiated from other extreme right-wing actions, and in Germany that is not easy.”
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Source: www.lavanguardia.com
