Judge Dennis Davis
The Trial of Adolf Hitler: Legalities and Propaganda, Part 1
Summary
An insightful and penetrating discussion around the 1924 trial of Hitler, and how Hitler used the trial as a stage to propagate his views and went on to use this propaganda to take power in Germany. Part 1 of 2.
Judge Dennis Davis
Dennis Davis is a judge of the High Court of South Africa and judge president of the Competition Appeals Court of South Africa. He has held professorial appointments at the University of Cape Town and University of the Witwatersrand, as well as numerous visiting appointments at Cambridge, Harvard, New York University, and others. He has authored eleven books, including Lawfare: Judging Politics in South Africa.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
What Hitler did, from the time he came in was to pass a whole series of laws which ultimately led to fundamental differentiation, discrimination, egregious treatment of Jews and others. He suspended the idea of a legal state, operating in the shadow of the Fuhrer, the authority of whom was executive. Then he supplanted the traditional idea of the judiciary with judges who were appointed simply to fashion laws, which suited Hitler.
I think the fact that he was a failed artist means he comes with an artistic sensibility. He was obsessed with architecture drawing and sketching buildings, trying to be an artist in Vienna, applying to the the art academy and being rejected. I think the fact that there’s an artistic sensibility gives rise to an awareness of the importance of the aesthetics, of the artistic, the the aesthetic need in formulating the medium of propaganda. He immediately grasped the use of radio using his voice to get into every home in Germany. We also know that he was trained in terms of his physical gestures and performance and he practised for hours in front of mirrors, the acting.