Alternative Journalism in Times of Crisis
by Alternative journalism as a reader-empowerment technique has been used throughout many centuries, though disregarded by current theories on communications. The following is a broad review on Elizabethan and WWII pamphleteering in times of crisis, particularly focusing on the pamphlets of the anti-Nazi group The White Rose. As we observe daily advances on new media, this article helps shed light on alternative journalism as an efficacious journalist tool.
Throughout World War II, free speech was gradually disappearing in Germany due to Adolf Hitler’s fear of opposition and dissidence. “The Gestapo watched constantly for signs of opposition, breaking up Communist cells, confiscating pamphlets that had been smuggled into Germany by Social Democrat leaders in exile in Prague,” explains Peter Hoffmann in his book “German Resistance to Hitler”. Freedom to speak one’s mind was limited to the point that individuals would cover their telephones with pillows in fear that their conversations at home might be heard by the political police. This fear of being discovered criticizing or conspiring against the Nazis did not impede, though, resistance movements even within the heart of Germany. The oppressed – despite censorship and, above all, the risk of death penalties – did revolt.
Hoffmann’s book explains the two phases of opposition that occurred during the rise and fall of the National Socialist movement. The first phase took place at the beginning of the 1930s and was a type of resistance that mostly used well-known old methods of political debate, which involved public expressions of one’s opinions. Throughout this period, also, newspapers continued circulating until they were suppressed and open verbal opposition remained until it was muted. Hoffmann explains that the trade unions, the Social Democrats and the Communists, were not united during the first phase of resistance and, in fact, Social Democrats and Communists were more opposed to each other than to National Socialism. This absence of political support among the strongest resistance to the Nazis produced a phase of opposition that could have tackled the National Socialist party at its most vulnerable stage – when it was rising – but, instead, was still concerned with political issues within the left-wing itself. Only after the meeting of the Communist International in Brussels, in 1935, that Social Democrats and Communists united to combat the Nazis, but unfortunately they had missed the most favorable time for opposition.
One group throughout the first phase of resistance, though, was more successful than its fellow dissidents and became widely known. Walter Lowenheim’s Marxist Leninist Organization was a leftist group prepared to tackle National Socialism at the time when it was still growing. “Lowenheim had founded the organization before 1933 to influence, renew, and if possible control along Marxist Leninist lines the entire socialist movement,” Hoffmann explains. All opposition groups became illegal in 1933, but Lowenheim’s group, then, survived underground through a pamphlet, Neu beginnen! (New beginning), produced in former Czechoslovakia under the pseudonym Miles. Lowenheim’s undercover activism, then, marked the beginning of the second phase of resistance to Hitler.
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