Final Project: Hitler and Expectation
As students of rhetoric, aesthetic word choice, sound arguments and extended metaphors have been ingrained in us at the tools which combine to form good rhetoric. Is that everything though? Are there not other means that are accessible to us that we can employ to enhance our connection with our audience and become more persuasive? For this essay I am going to target the 1934 Nazi Party Congress at Nuremburg for rhetorical analysis, but I am not going to look at Hitler’s speech on that day. Instead I will consider the rhetorical situation surrounding his discourse and analyze it based on insights from Bitzer, Kennedy, Brennan and Massumi. From there I will highlight techniques that transcend his sinister message and can be useful in a modern context, and how those techniques can be used to in unison with managing the expectation of the audience, and how both of those can be garnered to elicit a certain action out of the viewer – without even saying a word.
To begin, I want to whole-heartedly agree with the notion Bitzer sets out at the beginning of his article on The Rhetorical Situation: “The presence of rhetorical discourse obviously indicates the presence of a rhetorical situation” (Bitzer 2). Wherever there is an advertisement, a commercial, or in our example here – a speech – there is a rhetorical situation surrounding it and giving context to the discourse.
In the Hitler speech, there is quite a situation around him. There are flags, banners, sharply dressed men in uniform with clean haircuts and freshly shaven faces, and a long procession before Hitler ever says a word. These are all elements of the rhetorical situation, and according to Bitzer, these elements contextualize the discourse that is to follow.
Bitzer goes on to further characterize the role of the rhetorical situation “as a natural context of persons, events, objects, relations and an exigence which strongly invites utterance; this invited utterance participates naturally in the situation…” (Bitzer 5). Under this theory a rhetorical situation not only provides a context for the discourse, but the discourse is a natural participant in the situation – it belongs. It goes even further though – Bitzer says “the situation controls the rhetorical response” (Bitzer 6). So, given a rhetorical situation with a speech (per our example), the discourse will happen naturally in it, and the possible response will be bracketed or limited by the situation’s constraints. This puts a heightened importance on the “persons, events, objects” – or the flags, banners, and the processional – that surrounds the rhetorical discourse.
Hitler was no fool though. He and his men controlled and set up every aspect of the occasion of his speech in order to convey the message visually before Hitler had even arrived. This is an image from a documentary, The Triumph of the Will, made about the speech we are dealing with, and it shows the flag of the German Empire with the Iron Cross on it – a symbol of a time of affluence and deep pride for German citizens – juxtaposed with the Nazi flag. This placement conflates the two symbols, and says to the crowd that the Nazi party will restore the honor and prestige of old Germany. This statement is made during the processional into the city, so before any speech has been made, the crowd is already, if ever so subtly, being put into a state of mind to equate the Nazi party and its leaders to an affluent time for Germany. This is a powerful statement in poverty-stricken-post-World-War-I-Germany.
Massumi has some applicable ideas concerning the subtle parts of the Nazis manipulation of their surroundings. In his chapter entitled The Autonomy of Affect, he says that “the body is radically open, absorbing impulses quicker than they can be perceived” (Massumi 29). So even if the members of the crowd do not stop to cognitively make the connection between these two flags and their meanings, seeing them next to each other, even briefly, will begin to pair them in their mind. Eventually, when they see one, they will think the other, if the process is carried out.
Other instances of The Nazis controlling the rhetorical situation which Hitler is stepping into include the extravagance of his procession into Nuremburg, as seen in the picture below:
They had banners put up one right after another all along the parade route to ingrain the symbol and the party into the minds of the crowd.
The soldiers were all clean cut, well dressed and stood in a row. This showed organization and order, two attributes the Nazi’s wanted the people to know they could bring back to Germany.
And when night fell on the town, one symbol remained prominent in the night sky.
Along with the symbol, below it read the phrase “Heil Hitler”, to remind the people how they should respond to this charismatic leader.
Hitler certainly made for himself a well founded situation to set the stage for his speech. The crowd would marinate in Nazi paraphernalia and therefore would be seasoned and tender when he was to begin his speech.
Returning now to Bitzer, he posits that “a situation which is strong and clear dictates the purpose, theme, matter and style of the response[1]” (Bitzer 10). So by the Nazi party putting up swastika flags, coming into the city in a parade fashion, keeping clean cut soldiers around and letting each of those figures remain there even after nightfall, they had created a “strong and clear” situation. So according to Bitzer, they were shaping the audience’s response to what Hitler was going to say, before he even spoke a word.
Complementing the “strong and clear” situation the Nazi’s set up, the conflation and frequency of images used by Hitler has a greater effect. Brennan remarks that an “image has a physical, chemical effect of individuals and groups” (Brennan 71). To illustrate this she discussed an experiment in which men and women were shown an aggressive image. Each group responded to the image with an increase in testosterone levels, indicating a rise in aggression within the individual. Back to our example, the Nazis used conflating images of a better time for Germany and then juxtaposed their symbol right next to it – combining their meanings. So now, in light of Brennan’s analysis, it is clear that the swastika became a positive image for the German people, and their moods could actually have gotten better when they saw the red, white and black flag. Brennan also goes on to say, that “the crowd becomes more than a sum of its parts”, by the message being amplified through each member (Brennan 72).
Moreover, Massumi tells us that “language doubles the flow of images…there is a redundancy of resonation that plays up or amplifies…enabling a different connectivity” to the desired conclusion (Massumi 26). And since the audience for his speech had been marinating for a while in the rhetorical situation the Nazis designed for them, when Hitler actually begins his speech, his points will be all the more effective when they touch on the visual rhetoric around them. When he refers to returning Germany to their former might the audience will hark back to the visual conflation of the flags and their moods will lighten. When he speaks of rising out of poverty and the hardships they were in, the audience will be reminded of the clean cut young men reminiscent of a better time. Most importantly for his means however, when he speaks of peace and victory and power, the audience will see the banner that was flown all over the city and the symbol illuminated at night, and those ideas will amplify and resonate in their minds until they become one in the same, and Hitler’s message hits home.
What the Nazi’s goal was with the décor and whatnot was to create a rhetorical situation that guided the audience to a certain expectation. With all the extravagance in the face of their poverty, the juxtaposition of the German Empire and Iron Cross with the Nazi banner and the order and neatness of their presentation, the Nazi’s were leading the crowd at Nuremburg to a pre-drawn conclusion about what the Nazi party will do for them.
This is in line with one of Kennedy’s theses that reads: “the receiver’s interpretation of a communication is prior to the speaker’s intent in determining the meaning” (Kennedy 7). Applying that to this situation, it means that it doesn’t matter what was said, it matters rather what people think will be said. Hitler could have gotten up there and said (in a much simplified example) “one plus one is two” over and over again, but if the people gleaned from the context surrounding his message that “one plus one equaled three”, that could be what they took away from the speech. But if the audience already had in mind that one and one made two before Hitler said it, then all he would have to do is spoon feed the audience the message they were already looking for.
Bitzer agrees with that idea saying: “the expectations of the audience [are] themselves keyed to a [situation]” (Bitzer 9). So the situation not only creates a context for the spoken discourse but it also molds the audience’s expectation of what they are about to hear, and “controls their rhetorical response” (Bitzer 6). So if a rhetor can mold his/her own rhetorical situation, then he/she can bend their audience’s expectation of what they are about to hear, and partially direct their response. Manipulating the rhetorical situation allowed Hitler and the Nazis to control the crowd’s expectation of what the situation was calling him to say, so when he actually said it, they were already partially in support of it.
While Hitler is correctly acclaimed as an effective rhetorician (although obviously a sick narcissist), a lot of the credit for his effectiveness has been wrongly placed in his suave words, fallacious analogies and the destitute circumstances of Germany circa 1930. In reality some of the responsibility for his persuasiveness is owed to his ability to manipulate his rhetorical situation to guide the German public to a conclusion they had been led to expect as an obvious answer. Now if we can learn something from the way Hitler went about this, it is the importance of the rhetorical situation in which people insert themselves. The Nazis were quite effective at blending all different modes of persuasion together to work in harmony to convince the German people that their party was the best thing for the masses. Everything worked to that end, that main goal, and that continuity heightened the effectiveness of their message.
Now recall Massumi’s example of the story told in three different ways. His discussion of the three variations on the same story yielded an interesting way to consider the question of how to properly engage an audience. For the children viewing the stories, “the sad scenes were rated the most pleasant” (Massumi 23)[2]. To reconcile the fact that “sadness is pleasant” for the children, Massumi observed that “the distinction between form/content [= the sadness], and intensity/effect [= the pleasantness]…enables a different connectivity, a different difference, in parallel” (Massumi 24, 25). So the audience had received the story on two different levels – one, digesting the content of the story to recognize it as sad, and on a second level simultaneously, gaining pleasure from the intensity of the emotions evoked in it.
Massumi also posited that “an emotional qualification breaks narrative continuity for a moment to register a state – actually to re-register an already felt state” (25). So when a rhetor breaks his train of thought to engage the emotions, it appeals to the audience on a variety of levels. According to Massumi, the emotion had already been conveyed to them on a different level, just not explicitly. So when the emotion is qualified or acknowledged at the expense of the narrative (or logical flow) of the piece, the qualified emotion then resounds within the audience. This is a similar doubling quality that the Nazi’s images provided Hitler’s speech.
Backtracking for a moment, we saw that the rhetorical situation is made up of “persons, events, objects, relations and an exigence”, all which have images and emotions associated with each of them. Think of our example. The members of the crowd each saw the banners, soldiers, etc., and the images ere ingrained into the people. Now considering Massumi’s observations – that engaging the emotions through intensity works similar to drawing off images – it is evident that each element in the rhetorical situation also serves to evoke a different emotion in the person also. So if a rhetor were to engage the emotions of his audience as well as allude to the various images present, it would make him that much more effective to his audience. So it is elements in the rhetorical situation that convey to the audience both the expectation for what is going to be said and the expected emotional intensity of the rhetorical event that together shape the response from the crowd.
There is much for modern students to glean from these sources. It is not only the words which matter but everything about how they are presented draws the audience to a particular conclusion. Good rhetoric, is made up of more than arranging 26 letters in clever ways, but has to do with everything that you surround yourself with. We are taught to dress for the job we want, not the one we have – well this is an adaptation on a personal rhetorical situation. A person who wants to be promoted and therefore changes attributes about his/herself to suit the station they want to be in, has changed part of their rhetorical situation. By that altering of your rhetorical situation, you alter the expectation of the people around you and they begin to see you in a new role. Most of us will not change the world as we know it, but using rhetorical means, each of us can change our own place in it.
