Abstract
Abstract In an important early post-war treatment of the subject, Vondung analyses how the National Socialists appropriated and reworked a range of pre-existing genres in their development of a legitimizing set of rites, rituals, and ceremonies. Arguing that National Socialism relied particularly heavily on Christian ritual practices and liturgical forms for its inspiration, he characterizes the movement as a ‘political religion’; he also argues that the ‘revolutionary transformation’ achieved by the regime was not one of transformed social reality but one of transformed perception and representation. In drawing attention to rituals as embodying ideological beliefs which both contained and represented reality for their participants, Vondung rejects both totalitarian theories of ideology as manipulation and the more instrumentalist readings of fascism prevalent in the late 1960s, which also tended to downplay the significance of ideology as a belief system.
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