Publication/Publicación- Politics of Death. The Cult of Nazi Martyrs 1920-1939

Jesús Casquete, professeur à l’université du Pays basque et membre d’AMAPOL, vient de publier chez l’éditeur Routledge le volume Politics of Death. The Cult of Nazi Martyrs 1920-1939. Le livre, dont le descriptif et le plan sont en copié-collé ci-dessous, est une version remaniée du volume El culto a los mártires nazis 1920-1939 (Alianza, 2020).

Jesús Casquete, profesor de la Universidad del País Vasco y miembro del equipo de AMAPOL, acaba de publicar en la editorial Routledge el libro Politics of Death. The Cult of Nazi Martyrs 1920-1939. La obra, cuyo resumen y sumario quedan abajo, es una edición revisada del libro El culto a los mártires nazis 1920-1939 (Alianza, 2020).

 

Résumé/Resumen

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.

 

Sommaire/Sumario

1. Totalitarianism and the new man 2. “A healthy fist and love for the fatherland in the heart”: Nazi stormtroopers 3. The Nazi Martyrdom Frame 4. Conclusion

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