Folktales and the Führer: The Memeification and Racialisation of Mythology, Fairy Tales, and Folklore

During the rise of the Nazi Party, its leadership sought to promote the group’s power by pervading every facet of German life, bending the nation’s history, culture, taste, and language to its cause. One method of such indoctrination—the adoption of traditional folktales as ideological weapons—proved a valuable means of recruiting the youth of the Third Reich. In many ways, Nazi propaganda itself became a fairy tale told to a receptive volk. This chapter will ‘deep dive’ into the role mythology and folklore has had and continues to play in far-right ideologies and propaganda. It will detail the extent to which contemporary propaganda has structural similarities with historical representations of oppressed groups and describe how the far right have co-opted normative culture to conceal racialised messages that can thereby circumvent automated content-removal systems. To promote acceptance of such an approach, visual imagery is employed to transmit the propagandists’ ideals and perspectives that distil ideological opinions into rudimentary symbolic language that appeals and is readily accessible to audiences across language barriers.