Overview

"To disentangle the National Socialists’ path to power in Germany, one must attend to the discursive strategies and liturgical practices employed by its emocrats, or manipulators of emotions. The apotheosis of martyrdom in the National Socialist propaganda template is far from being a marginal element in the movement’s history. Owing to its mobilising and unifying potential in constructing a community of memory, the glorification of Nazi martyrdom constituted a fundamental pillar of the movement’s communicative and propaganda strategy, stressed to the point of paroxysm. The propaganda and lies that ground the construction of the martyr as a prefiguration of the ""new man"" are the core ideas that form the backbone of this book. The Nazis’ politics of death was a carefully managed element of National Socialism from its very inception. The martyrs, and their blood sacrificed on the altar of the fatherland, were an invaluable propaganda weapon. There were three pillars of the Nazi martyrdom frame: sublimation of death, posthumous sugar-coating and ""tamed"" death. Once the Nazi movement had taken control of German state apparatus, the mechanisms for disseminating the exemplary martyr in society may have changed, but not the specifics of the propaganda strategy itself."

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9781032413662

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THE POLITICS OF DEATH. THE CULT OF NAZI MARTYRS, 1920-1939 IS A VERY IMPORTANT STUDY OF THE MYSTIC GLORY THAT THE NATIONAL SOCIALISTS PAID TO THEIR FALLEN BROTHERS. IT WILL ENJOY A SIGNIFICANT PLACE IN EVERY BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE ERA. JAY W. BAIRD, MIAMI UNIVERSITY (OHIO) Jesus Casquete's anatomy of the Nazi cult of violent martyrdom invites us to see the SA not simply as an instrument of the Nazi movement on the rise, but as the prototype and forcing house for a fascist 'new man'. Drawing both on recent work by other scholars and on critical readings of key source material, this book is also a timely reminder of how central physical violence has always been to movements of the radical right. Eve Rosenhaft, University of Liverpool

Author Information

Jesús Casquete is Professor of History of Political Thought at the University of the Basque Country, Spain, and fellow at the Center for Research on Antisemitism (ZfA) in Berlin. His fields of research include social movements, political violence and twentieth-century German history.

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