German Propaganda Cartoons from 1937 to 1944
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Language: Italian This thesis is written in Italian

Original Italian title:
Il cartone animato di propaganda in Germania tra il 1937 e il 1944
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Giorgia Lucrezia Velluso, Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa - Napoli, 2005-06
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Giorgia Lucrezia Velluso
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Abstract
During the 20th century, fast channels of communication acquired inestimable value for Fascism. European dictators exploited social phenomenon as vital thrusts to increase the impact of the mass media. Every totalitarian state organized the physical and communicative space, making use of the press, radio, television and cinema. In Germany, Goebbels chose the cinema, in addition to the other fast communication channels, as a coercive system subordinated to politics and economics. The Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (Promi in German abbreviation) understood how to use the cinema as a vehicle for propaganda and means of persuasion, in agreement with one of the founders of the theory of mass suggestion, the American Edward Louis Bernays. Less known, or at best completely unknown to most, was the use of animated cartoons as a means of persuasion. And yet, animated cartoons were massively used for propaganda purposes since the First World War and found heavy use in the Germany of the Third Reich. Animated films played a significant role for their ability to combine the concreteness of the political message with aesthetic/linguistic innovation. This work focuses on animated cartoons as the actualisation, integration and solution of the contrast generated by the co-existence of opposing currents in the cultural history of Nazi Germany: in fact, we can see the simultaneous interweaving of native cultural heritage (in the form of fables, that constitute a modern mythological framework) with the violent irruption of modernity. The intent is clarify the role of animated cartoons in the construction and hierarchy of National Socialism, and to reconstruct a fragmentary and little-known body of work. The films analysed are symptomatic of a precise evolutionary moment in the ideological and cultural models that the Third Reich intended to transmit: even thought they had the privileged attention of an infantile and semi-adolescent public, they hardly descended to an elementary level. The works were full of political connotations, in constant dialectical relation to the Nazi administrative plan and did not at all exclude the language used in “true-to-life films” for adults. The final point of the analysis discusses rhetorical figures, largely copied from the Disney model, that led to the development of a full production plan for philo-Nazi animated cartoons characterised by total agreement with the government system.
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