Placing Hitler's "leader-people" construction in Bakhtin's speaker-listener-hero model

Kenneth Burke spares no praise for Hitler’s sheer rhetorical effectiveness in “Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’.” Deriding what he sees as a sort of timid laziness  in the way writers dissect Mein Kampf, he begins with a defense of his choice to analyze these strategies differently from the moralistic preaching-to-the-choir methods of the typical reviewer, by mere virtue of opportunity. “He was helpful enough to put his cards face up on the table…Let us, then, for God’s sake, examine them,” he analogizes, in 1939 (191).

Unlike the typical writer who attempts to “vandalize” the text, but distances himself from further, more effective (though perhaps ‘controversial’) rhetorical analysis, Burke takes the more difficult rhetorical road, refusing to beat around the bush, analyzing Hitler’s hand and the innate contradictions and ‘demagogic efficacy’ within. From his purely pragmatic standpoint, enlightenment is only possible through this now oft-considered ‘sacrilegious’ act. Burke argues that the strengths of Hitler’s strategy are of grave importance to warding off fascism in America, if that were ever the goal of shallow finger-waving publications.

Several patterns in both philosophy and structure can be derived from Kenneth Burke’s “Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’” and Bakhtin’s “Discourse in the Novel,” such as their formulaic analyses of unification devices, used to unite the masses under Nazism, and under which the “novelistic whole usually breaks down,” respectively. A common thread between the two is the performative nature of language in novelistic discourse as espoused by Bakhtin, which we can then use to examine “Mein Kempf” and Burke’s reading of it. 

Questions regarding agency, and the rhetorical triangle of speaker-listener-hero quickly come into question when parsing Hitler’s ascendency and the rhetorics employed to reach such a point. 

In the “speaker-listener-hero” model offered by Bakhtin, the speaker and listener seem more or less apparent. Hitler is the speaker, and the listeners are those who he seeks to persuade. However, due to the nature of Hitler’s strategy — to transfer his own singular “inner voice” to the “people” (those being his desired Aryan constituency) this matter becomes slightly more complicated (Burke 207). I may be perverting this model, but to me it seems that while in Bakhtin’s world, speech is never unitary, in Hitler’s suspended reality, perhaps it can be. Hitler want to speak for all of his followers. On page 208, Burke labels this “an astounding caricature of religious thought,” as he does umpteen times elsewhere in his essay. If to Adolph Hitler, he himself (leader) and the people (Aryans) are simultaneously both speaker and listener without necessarily being in conversation with one another, then perhaps by Hitler’s logic, the “hero” is “sacrifice” made by in resignation to the “struggle.” This sacrifice is not a material object (though it is materialistic to the Reich), it is an infinitely powerful and effective determinant in conversation with the unified leader-people.