220103 Propaganda: Politics and Pictures in European History, 1700-2000 (GST) (WiSe 2010/2011)

It is a commonplace that for politicians to be successful, they should be skilled manipulators of the public media. This link between politics and performance goes back to antiquity. Yet, thus far historians have remained comparatively reluctant to integrate visual sources fully into their discipline. This course, then, seeks to demonstrate how rather than being mere illustrations, pictures actively generate political power. Concentrating on the last three centuries of European history – from Louis XIV to Silvio Berlusconi – it revisits how different political actors have used visual forms of communication (painting, architecture, photography, television) to consolidate, legitimise and strengthen their power. Considering both autocratic / totalitarian regimes as well as democracies, it queries whether political systems affect the representation of power. The course also questions whether propaganda, conventionally understood as a form of excessive idealisation or dangerous distortion of reality, is necessarily a bad thing. Apart from considering case-studies from across modern European history, the course also discusses theoretical reflections that international scholars from various disciplines (including art history, political science and anthropology) have made on the relationship between pictures and political power.

Bibliography

Peter Burke. Eyewitnessing. The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (London: Reaktion Books, 2001): pp. 9-19 & 178-189.

Gordon Fyfe and John Law. “Introduction: On the Invisibility of the Visual.” In Picturing Power. Visual Depiction and Social Relations, edited by Gordon Fyfe and John Law (London: Routledge, 1988): pp. 1-14.