Our Party, Our Movement: Belief and Belonging in the Discursive Culture of Early National Socialism

Steven Pfaff, University of Washington, Seattle
Sean Everton, Naval Postgraduate School

Based on a unique corpus of autobiographies of early (joined the party before 1933) Nazis collected in 1934, we analyze the discursive culture of the National Socialist movement before the establishment of the dictatorship. We draw on topic modeling (LDA - Latent Dirichlet Allocation) and network analysis to examine the 579 available biographies collected by Theodore Abel (2012 [1938]; Spörlein et al. 2020). Topic modeling seeks to uncover latent topics within a collection of documents. The document-term matrix generated by topic modeling lends itself to network analysis tools, such as determining which topics (and terms) are central and how they cluster together (e.g., by using community detection algorithms). We draw on these tools to help explore the semantic culture of early Nazism as revealed by the biographies. We complement our semantic analysis with regression analysis predicting cluster assignment by the characteristics of respondents and anan interpretive analysis of the discursive culture of early Nazism. Combined, we show that Hitler created a movement that understood itself as a sectarian, populist alternative to old-fashioned, conventional national-conservative politics. Although notions of a racial community with its implicit anti-Semitism was awere a central feature of Nazi discourse, the discursive culture, the rarity of explicit anti-Semitism in the corpus suggests that Hitler’s early followers did not generally share his obsessive hatred of Jews nor understand it as a central part of the Nazi movement or its ideology. Keywords: Theodore Abel, Nazis, semantic culture, topic modeling, network analysis, text mining

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 224. Nazism and the Holocaust