Adolf Hitler: an Artist of Rhetoric

In his analysis of Adolf Hitler's writing, Burke recognizes Hitler as a master rhetorician. After all, he was able to create an enemy and convince an entire country to hate that enemy enough to go to battle under his lead. In order to understand how Hitler does this, we must understand Burke's own theories of rhetoric. In his "Definition of Man", Burke identifies man as a symbol using animal, an inventor of the negative, separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making, goaded by the spirit of hierarchy, and rotten with perfection. In "Equipment for Living", Burke claims that art is a strategy and we use strategies in order to explain and make sense of our environment. Burke proves that Hitler seemed to have understood all of this in his "Battle".

Adolf Hitler, being a man, is a symbol using animal. He created symbols and their connotations in order to lead a country. He created the symbol of the "bad Jew" and used that to turn Jews into an enemy. He then applied that symbol to numerous aspects of life, denoting them in the process. Burke writes "...by attacking "Jew finance" instead of finance, it could stimulate an enthusiastic movement that left "Aryan" finance in control" (204). Hitler uses the symbol of Jew, which carries ideas of destruction, hate, ignorance, manipulation, democracy, etc., and applies it anywhere that is beneficial to his plight of the German people.

Hitler is very much an inventor of the negative. Morality exists because humans see things for what they are not. We have a conception of "negative". Hitler uses this to create a morale amongst his people. He applies the same characteristics to both Jews and Aryans, yet the Jews are terrible people for it and the Aryans are superior.

"The Aryan self-preservation is based on sacrifice, the sacrifice of the individual to the group, hence militarism, army dicipline, and one big company union. But Jewish self-preservation is based upon individualism, which attains its cunning ends by the exploitation of peace... Still, that brings up another technical problem... We have been told how, by the "law of survival of the fittest," there is a sifting of people on the basis of their individual capacities...The Jew represents individualism; the Aryan represents "super-individualism"" (Rhetoric of Hitler's "Battle" 209-210).

Essentially, Aryans are perfect because they are NOT Jews, and Jews are the enemy because they are NOT Aryan. He has invented a negative that created a dichotomy between communities. It does not matter that they both value individualism because the Aryan individualism is always right and the Jew individualism is always evil.

In his essay "Equipment for Living", Burke talks about the word "strategy". He claims that "proverbs are strategies for dealing with situations"(296). We use language to deal with our environment around us. This is done through a specific strategy. Hitler uses strategy in his writings in order to deal with his situation of wanting to control an entire country. The strategy of language is seen in as art in the form of books. Burke writes "For surely, the most highly alembicated and sophisticated work of art, arising in complex civilizations, could be considered as designed to organize and command the army of one's thoughts and images..." (Equipment for Living 298). It is almost impossible not to relate this to Hitler's "Battle", especially considering his metaphor of an "army of thoughts". Hitler creates a piece of art, using the "art of rhetoric", that is strategic in manipulating a community of people.