I’ve always been told that Hitler was a masterful public speaker; that his support can largely be explained by his compelling, if not mesmerizing hold on crowds. This narrative is not common, it’s universal.
Sometimes I think this is emphasized over how much the crowds approved of the content of his speech.
How do native German speakers feel when they view footage of Hitler? Do you think the reputation is earned?
Not any kind of expert but I imagine his speeches have to be seen in context of the time, by the people hearing them live. What was it like for an average German dealing with high prices, high inflation, on the heels of being fucked for years by WW1 reparations in Versailles? Then along comes a leader who yes is a good speaker charismatic etc but also that leader’s message fits super nicely into the public sentiment of the time.
Reading the text of his speeches almost 100 years later cannot possibly provide the same experience.
Just read the comments, and have to add, don’t forget the mastermind behind his speeches. Goebbels. Hitler’s performance is for a native speaker of today a bit of too much anger, loud, and a rolling “r” nobody actually speaking in germany. It’s like a special Hitler-accent, if someone tries to speak like that, everyone know it’s about making a Hitler-Joke.
Listen for yourself and decide how compelling it is.
That language is at a very much higher grade level and complexity to that of the current political discourse. Wow.
We’ve regressed
That was interesting, it was quite a bit more boring than I expected, I know that sounds glib and immature but it’s just when I hear about figures like that whipping people in to a frenzy I kind of assumed there’d be a bit more emotional appeal and a lot more peaks and valleys to the emotional affect. There’s definitely times where I see it working, at the very beginning of the clip shortly after the original audio sample it seemed compelling, it’s a bit more theory dense than I’d have expected but I guess I tend to forget that that was what he was selling, not just the warmongering he’s famous for in English speaking countries.
I think this offered a bit of a window in to what it must have been like, but unfortunately the AI seemed to suffer a bit as time went on, especially accent wise. He started out sounding like a particular variety of English, as in from England in the UK, but with an oddly Australian lilt then briefly dipped in to just Australian without the English then a very long section of being an American which also corresponded to a change in the vocal quality to being more hoarse and broken. I don’t know a lot about AI tools but I would wager this might have had to do with limited training data, maybe only that speech itself was used, in fact given the pretty short section at the beginning that said “original audio sample”, maybe just that snippet was used to extrapolate the rest of the AI rendition of the rest of the transcribed and translated speech. That would explain why it seems so emotionally homogeneous throughout which probably lessens the charisma that’s supposed to have been so famous. Judging by his physicality in that original sample I get the impression that even within the context of raving anger and self righteousness that in reality he imbued his speeches with more variety of tone than we’re getting here. It feels like the AI had to do the best it could over a pretty long and dense text of the speech from an audio sample smaller than the resulting output, that might explain the meandering accent too. Also worthy of mention is the part where there’s a particularly hard to parse and pretty long sentence that bafflingly leads directly in to a verbatim repetition of that exact same sentence, which definitely sounds like a glitch, I feel possibly like the confusingness of the sentence itself might perhaps be a translation issue as well.
An interesting aspect to me is how the tone and style of the speech, especially in the early section before things start going off the rails feel really reminiscent of an Australian politician called Malcolm Roberts and lo and behold if Hitler had to pick favourites from Australia’s current political landscape, I think he’d be making his top ten.
Well for lack of a better comparison, it’s kind of like a Trump rally. Not quite, of course, the style Trump applies is tailored to the current American sensibilities, with his silly little dances and whatnot. But the way he wields anger and hate and “patriotism” to get a rise out of the crowd seems very much alike. And yeah, it’s sadly undeniable that Hitler had a talent for this. Greater one than Trump maybe.
Greater one than Trump maybe.
Hopefully!!!
Indeed. We shall find out it seems.
Politician hardly talk to the crowd with direct words, because it requires a level of nationalism and populism to still be convincing. A lot of solutions aren’t nice to the common folks. Take taxes for instance, most don’t like paying them. And if there are hard times and there’s just one person who promises you a better life, it’s compelling to follow. Hitler had a certain way of talking that made you feel emotions, in a time of desperation. And he promised solutions by declaring enemies.
Not to start with US politics here, but you can certainly look at how Trump talks and you see the same playbook. The same similarities. The same way of seeking for an enemy and also the false promises. Others talk like him too, but this is so recent.
When I hear these speeches, I think that he was a great manipulator. Not one with valuable content.
I wish I could link you the AI-translated hitler speeches, but they seem to have been removed from youtube.
Apparently a bunch of libs were going “Hey wait he was right” instead of “Holy shit I literally speak of immigrants and trans people the same way hitler spoke of jews”
The random meandering into completely unrelated topics is also fitting.
