Defacing the enemy: on the uses of photography in anti-American Nazi propaganda

Abstract This article examines the conflation of anti-American and antisemitic tropes in Nazi propaganda from the early 1940s, which combined texts and images. Drawing on recent scholarship on posters, photography, illustrated magazines, wall newspapers, and other visual material, the author focuses on a series of six posters located at the Munich City Museum (Münchner Stadtmuseum). The series allows us to interconnect various Nazi propaganda efforts, which claimed that US-American society was controlled by Jewish individuals subsumed under the conspiratorial label of “world Jewry.” This article argues that the visual and verbal defacement of the enemy worked by means of ridicule, condescending commentary, photographic distortion, and hate speech. Yet the author also questions the extent to which a tone of rhetorical exasperation characterizes this series of six posters. At a practical level, they were cut off from the global image market and had to recycle the few sources they could access, adjusting them to different propaganda contexts and purposes. The author therefore explores philologist Victor Klemperer's classic analysis of Nazi discourse, which examines whether the repetitive nature of Nazi propaganda had a potentially deafening effect on the public, possibly even leading to a sense of dissent among its viewers and readers.