English Advanced - Module C (WH Auden) - 4 minute speech

[bigro27]

This is a draft for a speech that we have in a few weeks. It cannot exceed 4 mins and so am looking for any feedback to reduce word count

Hey guys and welcome back to another episode of the Triple J ‘Hack’ podcast. I’m your host, Rohan Bhatia, and today we examine whether ‘Events, personalities or situations will always be interpreted and represented in different ways to reflect conflicting and evolving politics.’ Propagandists, through simplistically deceptive language, attempt to manipulate audiences into adopting their political perspective, skilfully convincing citizens of the supposed veracity of their views. This approach can be satirically employed by composers, to implicitly critique the use of such controlling language, while simultaneously presenting their own perspective on politics. Such satire is clear in WH Auden’s 1939 poems, Epitaph on a Tyrant and The Unknown Citizen (hereafter Epitaph and Citizen). In Epitaph, the poet harnesses euphemistic language to mask the evil of autocracy in his atypical representation of a tyrant. Citizen, on the other hand, is a chilling, dehumanising representation of human value from a bureaucratic perspective. Such oppressive characterisation of the populace reflects the worrying disconnection between totalitarian governments obsessed with power and the citizens themselves.In stark contrast to Auden’s satirical poetry is the 1940 Nazi Propaganda film, Jud Suss directed by Veit Harlan. The film uses dehumanising visual symbolism and exaggeration to vilify the Jewish population of Germany, attempting to instil fear and contempt amongst its predominantly Christian audience. Where Auden implicitly states his political agenda through the euphemistic language of propaganda, Harlan’s cynical filmic portrayal of Jewish people offers a chilling representation of exactly what the poet decries.

In critiquing simplistic language employed by authoritarian propaganda, Auden satirically employs a euphemistically, atypical representation of a tyrant in Epitaph to alarm ordinary citizens to such dangers. The title itself evokes a chilling irony, where the usual praiseworthy connotations of an epitaph are juxtaposed with the contrastingly brutal detonation that tyranny would’ve held for audiences witnessing Nazi and USSR horrors. In labelling the tyrant’s propagandist art as ‘poetry’ which was ‘easy to understand’, Auden sinisterly acknowledges how the tyrant harnessed language to profoundly manipulate a populace. Such diction demonstrates the persona’s dishonest skill of framing tyranny as virtuous but is also the poet signalling the potency of his own form in disturbingly being able to manipulate individuals too. This destructive control of language is reinforced by the final line of the poem “when he cried the little children died in the streets.”, which is an allusion to J.H. Motley’s representation of William the Silent as a just and compassionate ruler. Ironically, Auden inverts the Motley quote - “when he died the little children cried in the streets” - as he transforms the idea of public mourning for a beloved leader into a deeply sinister metaphor for how seemingly futile displeasures of the tyrant subsequently lead to countless deaths of the unbeknown populace. 


Additionally, in “The Unknown Citizen”, Auden explores the dehumanising consequences of realpolitik, exposing the harsh reality of eroding individuality at the expense of a oppressive government. In this context of totalitarian leaders like Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, Auden parodies the erecting of a monument for the eponymous ‘Unknown Citizen’ to the ‘Unknown Soldier’ which reinforces that blind subservience to manipulative governments can lead to the fatal eradication of identity and individuality. This idea is echoed through the intermittent rhyming scheme favourable in Modernist poetry, seen in couplets like “Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views//For his Union reports that he paid his dues”. The rhyme on ‘views’ and ‘dues’ as well as the praiseworthy tone indicates that in his adherence to the orthodoxy of the state, the citizen has fulfilled his obligations of conforming to the government’s conventions. Concluding, Auden presents us with the final hypophora, “Was he happy? Was he free? The question was absurd”. In addressing ideas of personal fulfillment for the “Citizen”, the bureaucratic representative condenses such ideas into the singular “question” which is dismissed, implicitly representing Auden’s fear that conformity has been prioritised over authentic individuality.

In stark contrast to Auden’s satirical, implicit approach, Veit Harlan’s more disconcerting filmic representation of Jewish people invites us to examine how 20th century fascist governments used persuasive propaganda to vilify groups, particularly by evoking the intrinsic human response of fear. In a chilling depiction of the Jewish Hasidic service, collective enigmatic chanting, exaggerated clapping and an overcrowded atmosphere encapsulated from a domineeringly high-angle shot allows Harlan to represent the Jews in a way that parallels adherents to a satanic cult-like sect. By dehumanising Jews to a group of believers with a devilish belief system having a along with a heavily jewelled object as the centerpiece of the ritual allows the composer to symbolically draw out inaccurate stereotypes of the greedy and possessive race that Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler aimed to spread widely. As such, Harlan evokes intrinsic human reactions of fear and subsequent contempt through chilling characterisations of Jewish people, which elucidates how vilifying propaganda successfully influenced non-Jewish German citizens to accept the oppressive belief system of the composer.