Winning the People: Hitler's Rhetoric

As much as Hitler’s “Battle” is a horrific and vicious account, it is rhetorically efficient, particularly because of the variety of rhetorical techniques he uses. For example, he utilizes pathos through Mein Kampf, in which he describes his “struggle.” Besides this, he uses “performances” of a common enemy, projection device, unifying voice, commercial use, symbolic rebirth, and inborn dignity. These tropes make the readers want to agree with Hitler, in a matter of speaking, because they relate to what he says.

Bakhtin’s ideas resonate somewhat in here, then, because “every concrete act of understanding is active: it assimilates the word to be understood into its own conceptual system filled with specific objects and emotional expressions…” (Bakhtin, 282). This is associated with the notion that everyone interprets everything differently based on their own perception, meaning that there is not one right meaning of a word or a concept. Hitler knew what he was doing when he penned the “Battle,” but he did it in a way that almost tricks his readers into thinking that he cares about their country and is interested in their best interests. Therefore, the people’s understanding of his goals were skewed when he presented it.

Because of this, a response was given within a short period of time, because “understanding and response are dialectically merged and mutually condition each other; one is impossible without the other” (Bakhtin, 282). Therefore, Hitler’s words, like “a sin against the blood and the degradation of the race,” are assimilated into a series of complex interrelationships that are people are unconsciously mindful of. On page 205, Hitler plays on this and the people’s psychological “ingredients” as he make statements that seem certain and far from debatable.

Burke mentions that the “yearning for unity is so great that people are always willing to meet you halfway if you will give it to them by fiat, by flat statement, regardless of the facts” (Burke, 205-206). This reinforces the tropes of inborn dignity and a unifying voice.

Unfortunately, I think that Hitler nailed his target through the “Battle,” because he does what Bakhtin thinks is most significant: he employs verbal art in his manifesto and prevails without having to use an abstract formal and ideological approach together. He exploits discourse as a social phenomenon and enables active understanding through materialization, especially in regard to a religious pattern that acted as an effective propaganda weapon and ultimately warded off all who Hitler saw unfit to live. Religious materialization was an effectual tool because religion in general had been undermined in the centuries before because of capitalist materialism. Hitler, therefore, was very aware of everything he was doing, primarily unifying “his people” to spark an animosity in reference to those who had a Jewish heritage, beliefs, or merely “appeared” Jewish. It is amazingly disgusting how well Hitler was able to use the ideal of “meaning” and rhetoric put into action to suggest and advocate certain behaviors that resulted in the enormous massacre that we know as the Holocaust. 

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.
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.