Talk:Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda

Improving the article
I've made a variety of changes to improve the article. One thing I'm not quite sure how to do is to change the title. The standard translation is "Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda" rather than "Popular Enlightenment," although both are used. "Public Enlightenment is used, for example, in the Goebbels entry. I'm not sure how one changes an article's title. Could some someone more knowledgeable than I change that? Bytwerk (talk) 22:15, 29 June 2008 (UTC)
 * I shall do it now. Gavin Scott (talk) 00:24, 30 June 2008 (UTC)


 * Thank you, Gavin. Bytwerk (talk) 00:57, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

I don't think that "Enlightenment" is the correct translation for "Aufklärung" in this case, it should be "Education". And "public" sounds a bit too neutral for "Volk" but I am not a native English speaker so maybe that's OK. In my opinion "Popular Education" or "National Education" seem to be the best translations. It is true that "popular education" is not exactly a Nazi concept but the Nazis had co-opted ideas from other political wings and considered themselves progressive, so it still makes sense. --77.184.175.122 (talk) 20:13, 29 February 2012 (UTC)


 * You are right that the translation is not perfect — but it is the one used by most of the standard English-language books on Nazi propaganda (e.g., Bramsted, Welsh, Herf, and many more). In English, "education" tends to suggest schooling of some sort, which isn't what the Nazis had in mind, exactly.  Bytwerk (talk) 04:20, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

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Censorship and different POVs
Were there any non-Nazi media in Nazi Germany? Was there censorship (of domestic and foreign correspondents)? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 13:51, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Referencing and sources
As much as most of the content on the article seems reasonable enough, I desperately miss references to specific claims such as "The Ministry grew steadily. It began in 1933 with five departments and 350 employees. By 1939, there were 2000 employees in 17 departments. Between 1933 and 1941, the Ministry's budget grew from 14 million to 187 million Reichsmarks." This is a terrible miss in the article right now. — Lasse Havelund (p · t · c) 18:42, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Volksempfanger
Radio manufacturers received grants from the government to build cheaper receivers; these sets were manufactured so that they could not pick up foreign, non-Nazi broadcasts

This is not exactly true. It would be more accurate to say that they could not easily pick up such broadcasts. Either way shouldnt there be a link to the article on the recievers in question ? 89.242.196.80 (talk) 18:17, 10 June 2011 (UTC)

Original German
While debating over the fidelity of your translation of the German title, you should at least include that untranslated title in the article itself. That's standard practice, after all. Even here in the Talk section you failed to supply the original name. Orthotox (talk) 21:25, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

The head line of this article should be changed. The name of the ministry in German is: Reichsministrium fur Volksaufklärung und Propaganda. Aufklärung in the German language should not be translated with enlightenment. Even though Goebels had great admiration for Buddhism, his wife was a Buddhist, he was not trying to enlighten the Germans. His task as minister of Propadanda was to clarify the Germans and bring them the 'truth'. So I think:

'Reichsministerium of Public Clarification and Propaganda' would be better. I also suggest to keep Reichsministerium rather than Reich Ministerium. Reich als means 'Rich' in German. Or it could be Reichsministery. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 5.132.22.99 (talk) 11:04, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
 * As with other German titles, this one is open to more than one translation to English; but, what is used is the WP:Common name translation. Which is also WP:RS cited. Kierzek (talk) 14:22, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Why is the title a mixture of German and translated words? Agnerf (talk) 10:48, 14 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Again that is WP:Common name translation and use. Kierzek (talk) 13:38, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
 * And as noted above, “Enlightenment” is the translation used in most scholarly work. It’s not ideal — but nobody uses “Clarification.”  Sometimes, you go with the standard translation. Bytwerk (talk) 01:30, 17 August 2017 (UTC)
 * For what it is worth, almost a year later, "Reich Ministry of Public Education and Propaganda" would be a lot more fitting, as "Public Enlightenment" gives it a lot more meaning than it has in the original German. JulkaK ([[User talk:JulkaK|talk) 08:23, 27 August 2018 (UTC)
 * Well, there really isn’t a perfect translation. Aside from the fact, noted above, that “public enlightenment” is the standard scholarly translation, I don’t think that “education” is the right word. The Nazis could have used “Volksbildung,” as the East Germans did, if they wanted to focus on education.  “Aufklärung” is the German word used for the “Age of Enlightenment,” for example.  I don’t think anyone would want to translate that from German as the “Age of Education.”  And translating “Volk” as public isn’t perfect either.  But as Kierzek notes above, Wikipedia’s practice is to use the WP:Common name. Bytwerk (talk) 23:24, 2 September 2018 (UTC)

Some time ago I added in the German article that the word "propaganda" was understood as a neutral term at that time. (Please compare what the Latin word "propagare" really means!) Of course, nobody did want to associate this with manipulation and censorship in public. Today one would say due to his tasks: "... for culture, media and public relations". And of course it was a downplaying of the real goals that the government was pursuing. The negative connotation of the word "propaganda" in the German language came later. It was just important to me to show how the Nazis played a bad game even just with the words in official German. --H7 (talk) 11:40, 26 January 2020 (UTC)