Let’s start with a simple practical exercise. Find yourself a plastic bag. It can be any ordinary bag—perhaps one you brought rolls home from the store in. The thinner and more common, the better. Grasp the bag with both hands and try to stretch it taut. You don’t need to pull hard, just make sure it’s stretched and straight. Now lift the taut bag up to your face so it’s roughly at face level. The bag should be stretched downward, so your face is like looking through a glass window, except it’s a plastic bag. Now bring your lips to the bag. Careful—don’t breathe in, don’t swallow, don’t chew. The moment the bag touches your lips, start speaking. You can talk about anything, but it will sound best if you speak loudly and emphatically about wanting to charge into Poland with tanks. Long-term use of the bag may lead to color blindness and a sense of black-and-white perception.
With the plastic bag, you’ll hear how difficult it was in the 1920s and 30s to speak to the masses gently, with nuance, quickly—let alone quietly. Radio broadcasting gave rise to what Germans called Rundfunksprache. Slow, emphatic, and direct German. Any politician who wanted to captivate audiences had to speak unnaturally forcefully, directly, sharply. And the German political scene found exactly such a talent. Rundfunksprache was an advantage for him, much like Kennedy’s kidney disease, which made him always look tan on television. Rundfunksprache never disappeared—we just call it “algorithm” now.