Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of the book. The book outlines the connection between a mass culture and a political movement. It expresses that the culture of consumption influences, even contaminates, politics – and that the two spheres affect each other, a consumerised politics and a politicised consumption. The book establishes the status of marketing persuasion as historical actor, some will recoil from the idea. It discusses the after-life of Nazism, its representation in popular culture. Many hundreds of documents dating from the Nazi era are contained therein – propaganda manuals, training programmes, internal reports, journal pieces from the in-house magazines of Nazi institutions, speeches, posters, theoretic articles, reflective discussions, empirical reports, practitioner bulletins and so on. The book explores the enigma of Third Reich propaganda through the trinity of Myth, Symbolism and Rhetoric as the conceptual framework.