ABSTRACT
The 'greatness' of Adolf Hitler subsists in the narrow sense of an event-making man, greatness here being an academic formulary that excludes any idea of moral status. The stature of Hitler was as a rhetorical performer and propagandist visionary, one of the greatest actors of all time, who conceptualised the world, crudely, brilliantly, as a stage set. Hitler was the actor-manager of the Reich, the central character in its pageant, the author of its script, the conceptualiser of its stage set; he dominated the rest of the cast in this melodrama and vigorously rehearsed and evolved his stage role. Hitler was the general manager of the spectacular, the dark lord of political gimmickry. Nazi ideology had two components: a belief system and a proselytisation system – a credo and a method. Everything Hitler did was dressed in the symbolic, and he understood the role of symbolism in structuring a public meaning as few politicians have ever done, before or since.
