Accustomed to following the course of political events with keen attention, propaganda had always interested me to a remarkable degree. I saw it as a tool that Marxist and socialist organizations mastered and used with skill. I soon realized that the appropriate application of propaganda truly constituted an art, almost unknown to the bourgeois parties of the time. The Christian Social movement, especially during Lueger’s time, was the only one capable of using this tool with a certain skill, which earned it many of its successes.
During the Great War, it began to become clear what enormous results well-conducted propaganda could lead to. What we had neglected, the enemy exploited with incredible skill and a truly brilliant sense of calculation.
The enemy’s war propaganda was a great lesson in my political life.
Did German war propaganda really exist?
I must sensibly answer no. Everything that had been done in this order was so deficient and flawed from the start that it yielded no benefits and at times even proved counterproductive.
Deficient in form, psychologically flawed in character. Such is the conclusion reached by a close examination of German war propaganda.
Propaganda is a means and must be considered from the perspective of the objective it serves. Its form, therefore, must be tailored to support the objective pursued. The purpose for which we fought in the war was the most sublime and magnificent imaginable for humankind. It was about the freedom and independence of our people, it was about ensuring our survival in the future—it was about the honor of the nation. The German people fought
for the right to a human existence, and supporting that struggle should have been the objective of our war propaganda.
The moment the peoples of this planet struggle for their existence, that is, when the decisive problem of being or non-being becomes imminent, humanitarian or aesthetic considerations are reduced to nothing. As for humanism, Moltke already said that, in war, it lay in the celerity of the procedure, that is, humanitarianism consequently presupposed the use of the most effective means of struggle. Accordingly, the cruelest weapons were humanitarian if they accelerated the achievement of victory, and only those methods capable of helping to assure the nation the dignity of its autonomy were good.
In such a life-or-death struggle, this should have been the only possible orientation for war propaganda. If the so-called responsible authorities had realized this, they would never have been able to fall into such insecurity about the manner and means of employing that resource, which is also a weapon, and a truly terrible one, in the hands of those who know how to use it.
Every propaganda action must necessarily be popular and adapt its intellectual level to the receptive capacity of the most limited of those for whom it is intended. Hence, its purely intellectual level must be regulated downwards, the larger the total human mass to be reached. But when it comes to attracting an entire nation within the sphere of influence of propaganda, as circumstances require in the case of waging a war, one can never be sufficiently prudent in ensuring that the intellectual forms of propaganda are, as far as possible, simple.
The assimilation capacity of the great masses is extremely limited, and their comprehension capacity is no less small; however, their memory deficit is enormous. Given this background, all effective propaganda must be limited to only a few points and exploit them as aphorisms until every child of the people can form an idea of what is being sought. The moment propaganda sacrifices this principle or attempts to become multifaceted, its effectiveness will be weakened for the simple reason that the masses are unable to retain or assimilate everything that is offered to them. And with this, success suffers, ultimately becoming completely null.
It was a fundamental error to ridicule the adversary, as the Austrian and German newspapers did; a fundamental error because, when the moment came, the individual found himself face to face with the enemy, his convictions completely changed, which certainly must have had very serious consequences. Under the immediate impression of the adversary’s resistance, the German soldier felt disappointed by those who had until then enlightened his judgment, and instead of experiencing a reaction of greater fighting spirit, or at least a consolidation of it, the opposite phenomenon occurred; a momentary discouragement ensued.
In contrast, English and American war propaganda was psychologically appropriate because by portraying the Germans as barbarians, like the Huns, they predisposed their soldiers to the horrors of war and thus helped to save them from disappointment. The most reckless weapon that could have been used against them must then have seemed to them nothing more than a confirmation of what they had already heard, thus increasing their faith in the correctness of their government’s assessments and deepening their fury and hatred toward the cursed enemy.
Thus, the English soldier never had the impression of having been falsely informed from his country, quite contrary to what happened with the German soldier, who ended up generally rejecting the information he received from the rear as “lies.”
The purpose of propaganda is not to coerce the rights of others, but to emphasize exclusively one’s own, which is the object of such propaganda. A capital error was to discuss the question of war culpability by considering that not only Germany was responsible for the outbreak of the catastrophe. It would have been better to place the blame entirely on the enemy, even if Germany had truly been guilty, which, in reality, was not the case.
The mass of the people are unable to distinguish where the injustice of others ends and where their own injustice begins.
The vast majority of people are, by nature and judgment, so feminine that their way of thinking and acting is more subordinated to emotional sensitivity than to reflection. This sensitivity is not complicated; on the contrary, it is very simple and decisive. For them, there are no many differentiations, but rather a positive and a negative extreme: love or hate, justice or injustice, truth or lies, but never anything in between.
English propaganda understood and took all this into account with true brilliance. Indeed, there were no two-sided arguments there to give rise to doubt. Proof of its admirable understanding of the primitive emotionality of the great masses was its propaganda about “German atrocities,” perfectly adapted to the circumstances and ensuring, in a manner as unscrupulous as it was brilliant, the necessary conditions for maintaining morale in the theater of war, even in the face of the greatest defeats. Another proof of English propaganda in this regard was the forceful accusation it made of the German enemy, considering it the sole culprit for the outbreak of war. A lie that, only thanks to the biased and shameless persistence with which it was disseminated, was able to adapt to the passionate and always extremist sentiment of the masses, and thus earned its credibility.
Variation in propaganda should never alter the meaning of the object of that propaganda; rather, from beginning to end, it should always mean the same thing. The motive in question can be considered from different points of view, but it is essential that every exposition invariably entails, in summary, the same formula. Only in this way is it possible to make propaganda effective and uniform.
The success of any advertising campaign, whether in commerce or politics, requires persevering action and consistent uniformity in its application. Four and a half years later, a revolution broke out in Germany, the slogan of which came from enemy war propaganda.
England had realized something else when it considered that the success of the spiritual weapon of propaganda depended on the magnitude of its use and that this success fully compensated for all economic effort.
Propaganda was considered a first-rate weapon there, while among us it meant nothing more than the last crumb for politicians without standing or the possibility of a rearguard position for modest heroes.
Therefore, overall, the result of German war propaganda was zero.
