In the Air: Shell Shock Theatre and Ornamental Girls in Nazi Propaganda

How can we determine Nazi mass theatre as a specific propaganda tool against the backdrop of today’s research on environmental knowledge, media ecologies and questions of governmentality? In this article, I argue that propagandist mass stagings with their specific theatrical dramaturgies of war were a thoroughly modern mode of affect politics that understood mass choruses as environmental figures and thereby corresponded with media and biopolitical developments. However, mass theatre during Nazism changed over time. While early stagings addressed the shell shock of World War I via soldierly aesthetization of masculinity, they were later transformed into spectacular, re-gendered modes of propagandist entertainment. Therefore, the development of Nazi mass theatre also indicates a change in the art of (self-)governing. And this change goes beyond, as I would suggest, the political context of this specific dictatorial regime.