The Power of Hitler's Rhetoric

Burke points out that Hitler’s influence over his followers is a product of a powerfully mastered understanding of rhetoric and its use. Hitler “swung a great deal of people into his wake” and cast an even greater deal out, all by manipulating language and effectively molding the people’s understandings of words and concepts to his liking (Burke 191).

In order to divert his people’s attention from the real causes of Germany’s economic strife, Hitler blamed the financial ills on supposed social and cultural ills. Only he had the “medicine” to solve this sickness (Burke 192). Through his rhetoric, Hitler effectively assimilated the term Jew with evil, devil, and hate, while simultaneously linking himself and his superior Aryan race with heroism, sacrifice, and love. Burke points out that the most powerful means of unifying a people is to turn them all against a common enemy. This idea that “men who can unite on nothing else can unite on the basis of a [shared] foe” is what drove Hitler’s rhetoric. His main goal was to unify his preferred people (the Aryans) by fostering and perpetuating hatred against the Jews (Burke 193).

This idea of defining something by what it is not reminded me of Derrida and his notion of differance. Derrida points to how we understand words by first understanding what they are not. We know boy because we know it is not girl. We know cat because it is not dog and it is not bird. It seems that Hitler takes this theory and implements it on a more widespread and politically manipulative scale. He unites his people by pointing out to them and convincing them of what they are not—non-Aryan, Jewish, Negro, and so on. He then makes them believe that these things that they are not are inferior traits that are in turn causing the demise of Germany. So, because they are not Jews, they are superior.  Like Derrida’s words, Hitler and his people are most clearly understood in terms of what they are not.

Burke posits that the “materialization of a religious pattern is…one terrifically effective weapon of propaganda” and Hitler demonstrates this to a tee (Burke 194). By singling out the Jew, Hitler materializes a “visible, point-to-able” form, a certain type of people with a certain kind of blood (Burke 194). With his rhetoric, he convinces his people that dignity is inborn; it runs in the blood…of Aryans and not Jews. Hitler’s rhetoric also relies on the use of projection devices, his ability to hand his issues and ills over to a scapegoat who in turn takes the blame. As aforementioned, Hitler effectively took his country’s economic strife and blames it on one class of people. There were no longer problems with finance, there were problems with Jew finance. By unloading a “greater amount of evils…upon the back of the enemy,” Hitler unites his people against an external foe, rather than an internal one (Burke 203).

The means by which Hitler does all of this is quite representative of Bakhtin’s arguments in favor of the power of language. Bakhtin argued that language was “generational” (Bakhtin 290). By this he meant something much wider, not that the meanings of words just change over time, but that words have the power to influence and result from entire ideological shifts. Words have a “verbal-ideological life”, in which they have certain power to demonstrate the co-existence of a socio-logical contradiction between different groups (Bakhtin 290). For this reason language is inherently social, existing within these groups. It is also performative, allowing individuals to coin new terms that are then associated with their generation/ideology/social group.

This idea of the performative power of language and the way it can represent ideologies is inherent to Hitler’s rhetoric. Through his speeches and his book Mein Kampf, he creates an entirely new understanding of language for his followers to latch onto. He synonymizes Jew with all things negative. Because of this, his people understand the word Jew in this way and only this way. He does the same with Aryan, only with all things positive. Burke outlines the way that Hitler’s power of word and concept association affected his people: his voice identifies a leader of people who strives for unity, the people of the Reich which has it’s Mecca in Munich and can be associated with hard work, war, strength, responsibility, and sacrifice.

Bakhtin would undoubtedly agree that Hitler’s words have “the ability to infect with [their] own intention certain aspects of language”, meaning that he has the power to manipulate and even change the meaning of language (Bakhtin 290). This is without a doubt a sign of mastery of rhetoric. When I think of the power that language has to demonstrate ideological trends, I think of a steady evolution of language throughout time. In Hitler’s case, however, he so strategically uses his associative tricks to quickly convince his people of these new meanings of Jew (devil) and Aryan (perfection) and all related terms. For instance, when he mentions enemy, his people no immediately who he is referring to. It is a wonder that one man has such great rhetorical power. With his language, Hitler was able to create a whole new context (a power of language that Bakhtin identifies). He eliminates the situation in which Germany’s problem is it’s wounded economy and introduces a context in which Germany’s problem is the Jewish people who are wounding the economy.

What is interesting though, is that Bakhtin seems to focus his argument on the novel. He makes obvious his distaste for poetry and in turn favors the novel’s truth and heteroglossia. He speaks of an author and a speaker within the text. Above I have considered both Hitler’s text in Mein Kampf as well as in his actual speeches. By attributing Bakhtin’s ideas to Hitler’s rhetoric, I am suggesting that his theory transcends the novel. Hitler is thus the author of his spoken words, embodying the persona of the speaker. Through his speeches as well as his book, Hitler’s words have the transformative and performative power to completely mold the ideologies and lives of his people.

--Morgan Jantzen

Sources:

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. “Discourse in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. 259-331, excerpted.

Burke, Kenneth. “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’.” In The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, Third Edition. Berkeley: U of California P, 1973. 191-211.

Derrida, Jacques. “Différance.” Literary Theory: An Anthology, Second Edition. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Wiley/Blackwell, 2004. 278-288.