Chorus and Ornament: On Nazi Crowd Control
Often perceived as static and monolithic, what is determined as “fascist aesthetics” changes fundamentally in the mid-1930s. The collective figure of the populace is transposed into an ornamental allegorization of Nazi power. This implies a paradigm shift in propaganda politics from sound to spectacle. It can not only be discussed in light of a re-accentuation of media dispositifs, due to the establishment of the sound film, which evokes new perspectives on the ornament of the masses and its propagandist utilization. It also evokes the emergence of new modes of subject formation and the question of their current afterlife in the totalization of perspective.