"After extensive years of research, the third volume of this series is finally available. As with the first two volumes, it chronologically covers official issues, ""printed to private order"" for special events and propaganda cards for the years 1940-1945. For added interest, the colorful cards from annexed and occupied countries are also included: Austria, Bohemia and Moravia, Poland, Alsace and Lorraine, Latvia, Ukraine, Serbia, Albania, the Island of Rhodes, just to name a few. This volume will be of particular value to collectors as it is almost 100% full color, to include all the imprinted stamps. This allows for close scrutiny of the various overprints and the identification of the numerous color variations. If you love the study of postcards, be prepared to be emersed in more color and variant details than ever seen before."
Made available to the public for the first time, these posters from the archives of the German Historical Museum reveal a regime determined to influence and control the citizens of East Germany. In the age of the internet, poster art is fading into history, but its importance as historical document remains valuable and enlightening. An inexpensive and efficient means of mass communication, the poster was used extensively by Communist regimes in order to maintain state control. This collection of 150 of the most outstanding works from a selection of more than 10,000 posters archived by the German Historical Museum features works that are both poignant and valid in light of current global politics. Although propaganda posters were used in a variety of communist countries, those that emanated from East Germany are unique in their subtlety and nuanced messages. Many posters appropriate American or Western European symbols and others used humor to get their point across. Grouped chronologically according to such themes as post-war years, the prospect of peace, denouncement of the West, and praise for Communist allies, these beautifully reproduced works provide a historical and cultural snapshot of East Germany during its entire history.
Presidents, Prime Ministers and Secretary Generals of totalitarian states in the twentieth century have been highly conscious of the need to present a national image suited to the new political culture they sought to inculcate. In these regimes, state-sanctioned art performed a key function, giving visual dimension to an abstract political ideology. There is a striking similarity between the idealized images from these countries. This book presents about fifty postcards from the Soviet Union, Germany, Italy, Spain, and China, between 1920 and the 1960s.While some of the images are of a high aesthetic calibre, others are simply intended to portray a vernacular socialist realism or to cultivate the cult of the leader. Taken together, they form a fascinating look at the art of power and its expression at a time of political upheaval and experiment.
Nearly sixty years after the end of World War II the Third Reich continues to fascinate both authors and readers. Nazi propaganda, in particular, has been the topic of countless books, as have the personalities involved in the German propaganda machine. Yet, despite all of the efforts in this regard, one aspect of that propaganda study has remained largely unexamined. It is the regimes use of postal materials as a tool for expressing its propaganda message. In this new, profusely illustrated book, Albert L. Moore offers readers an overview of the images and messages that filled the mailboxes of Hitlers subjects and victims. As official documents of Nazi Germany, the stamps, postcards, and even postmarks used during the time provide the reader with an explicit picture of the types of propaganda messages every German was expected to see and act upon on a daily basis. Moores groundbreaking work helps us to better understand this powerful, yet heretofore unrecognized, weapon in Hitlers propaganda arsenal. This is not merely a book for those interested in stamps or postcards as collectibles, it is a book for those who desire to better understand what it was like to live inside the Third Reich!
Why do totalitarian propaganda such as those created in Nazi Germany and the former German Democratic Republic initially succeed, and why do they ultimately fail? Outside observers often make two serious mistakes when they interpret the propaganda of this time. First, they assume the propaganda worked largely because they were supported by a police state, that people cheered Hitler and Honecker because they feared the consequences of not doing so. Second, they assume that propaganda really succeeded in persuading most of the citizenry that the Nuremberg rallies were a reflection of how most Germans thought, or that most East Germans were convinced Marxist-Leninists. Subsequently, World War II Allies feared that rooting out Nazism would be a very difficult task. No leading scholar or politician in the West expected East Germany to collapse nearly as rapidly as it did. Effective propaganda depends on a full range of persuasive methods, from the gentlest suggestion to overt violence, which the dictatorships of the twentieth century understood well. In many ways, modern totalitarian movements present worldviews that are religious in nature. Nazism and Marxism-Leninism presented themselves as explanations for all of life—culture, morality, science, history, and recreation. They provided people with reasons for accepting the status quo. Bending Spines examines the full range of persuasive techniques used by Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic, and concludes that both systems failed in part because they expected more of their propaganda than it was able to deliver.
The German Corpse Factory' is one of the most famous and scandalous propaganda stories of the First World War. It has been repeated many times down to the present day as the prime example of the falsehood of British wartime propaganda. But despite all the attention paid to it, the full story has never been properly told. In Spring 1917, parts of the British press claimed that Germany was so short of essential fats and glycerine that the German Army was being forced to boil down the bodies of its own dead soldiers, causing a brief scandal of accusation and counter-accusation, including the claim that the story was the invention of the British official propaganda organisations. Behind the scenes, British propaganda experts opposed exploiting the story as it was obviously false, and contrary to their basic principles of never telling an obvious lie in an official statement. But at the time, the British government refused to deny that the 'German Corpse Factory' might really exist. In 1925 the scandal re-erupted in New York, when the former head of British military intelligence on the Western Front, in the United States on a speaking tour, was quoted in newspapers as having confessed to making the whole German Corpse Factory story up, a claim that he immediately denied. As a gesture of friendship on the occasion of the Locarno treaties, the British government now accepted the German government position that the story was a lie, but in fact neither government knew what had really happened in 1917. This book provides the answers to these questions according to the best historical evidence available. It uses the scandal of the 'German Corpse Factory' as a case-study to explore the true nature of British official propaganda and its organisations in the First World War, including the events of 1917 and who might really have been responsible for the story. It also shows how this brief episode was taken up by the German government after 1918, and by interest groups in Britain and the United States after 1925, to paint a false picture of British propaganda, with far-reaching consequences for the peace of Europe, and for our subsequent understanding of the First World War.
Essays by Jay Winter, Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Jennifer D. Keene, and others reveal the centrality of visual media, particularly the poster, within the specific national contexts of Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States during World War I.℗¡Ultimately, posters were not merely representations of popular understanding of the war, but instruments influencing the.
Adolf Hitler, writing in Mein Kampf, was scathing in his condemnation of German propaganda in the First World War, declaring that Germany had failed to recognize propaganda as a weapon of the first order. This despite the fact that propaganda had been regarded, arguably for the first time, as an intrinsic part of the war effort. David Welch has written the first book to fully examine German society -- politics, propaganda, public opinion, and total war -- in the Great War. Drawing on a wide range of sources -- from posters, newspapers, journals, film, parliamentary debates, police and military reports, and private papers -- Welch argues that the moral collapse of Germany was due less to the failure to disseminate propaganda than to the inability of the military authorities and the Kaiser to reinforce this propaganda, and to acknowledge the importance of public opinion in forging an effective link between leadership and the people.
