Party Rallies and the Thingspiel in the Third Reich

Abstract

Referring to the German borders presented on the sports field at the 1930 Rhine spectacle the Berliner Tageblatt wrote that ‘a bulwark of young bodies protects the Reich’.¹ This description could have well been used to comment on festivities in the Nazi period which are frequently characterised as efforts striping away individual identities and creating an emotional, uniformed and militarised people’s community. Allegedly this manifested the principles of a totalitarian ideology.² But as illustrated in previous chapters, the representation of the republic was influenced by ideas of community, occupying public space, territorial wholeness, mass experience and the creation of visual impressions, too. Some of these concepts apply to state representation in general. However, the explicit stress on community and mass involvement did not only distinguish the republic from the Kaiserreich but characterised the whole period from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s.