April 23, 2010

‘Hidden Forces’ and ‘Hot Impulses’ – for a satisfying Totalitarian brand experience

If you haven’t already come across these two books, your friends at Curated Secrets can highly recommend them. The first is Iron Fists: Branding the 20th-Century Totalitarian State, which was lavishly published by Phaidon. You don’t have to be a connoisseur of conspiratorial puppet-mastering to see that many of the horrors of the past hundred years were aided by elaborately manufactured public spectacles, uniforms, flags and symbols. In 1958, even Aldous Huxley chimed in: “It is by manipulating ‘hidden forces’ that the advertising experts induce us to buy their wares–a toothpaste, a brand of cigarettes, a political candidate… Hitler induced the German masses to buy themselves a Fuehrer, an insane philosophy, and the Second World War.”

What Iron Fists shows is how, for example, the Third Reich was a “massive sociopolitical Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art)”–with Hitler as chief designer, down to the level of “regime-specific typefaces”.

Propaganda and Popular Enlightenment Minister Dr. Goebbels (with his doctorate on 18th Century romantic drama) is supposed to have said, “Whenever I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my revolver.” Not exactly a kind-hearted humanitarian, he did spell out his strategy in these terms: “We live in an age that is both romantic and steely. The bourgeois were alien and hostile to technology, skeptics believed that the roots of the collapse of European culture lay in it. National Socialism has understood how to take the soulless framework of technology and fill it with the rhythm and hot impulses of our time.”

This “total work of art” was, to say the least, not striving for elegance or good taste. Historian Norman Stone called the Berghof, the great Nazi mountaintop retreat, as

a building fit for an Ian Fleming villain. Huge slabs of red marble adorned it; looted pictures hung on the walls; there was a vast, thick carpet; a huge fire burning in the grate; oversized armchairs were placed an uncomfortable distance apart, in such a way that the guests would have to half-shout their platitudes at each other as the sparks leapt from the fire in the gathering twilight.

Which brings us to our other recommendation, Peter York’s coffee-table Dictator Style. York was author of the 1980s hit book The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook. Dictator Style, with its amazing photography, makes for reading and browsing that is simultaneously hilarious and depressing. As the publisher’s blurb puts it, “All your favorite dictators are here: Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Tito, Mussolini, Mobutu, Idi Amin, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos — each with their own uniquely frightful chic. An interior decorating book like no other.”