Results and discussion

Bataille’s essay accurately describes the political utility of a racist appeal to the

‘sovereign law of value’ which, as I showed in my introduction, had a particular applicability in Germany.⁴⁰ However, what he could not show in 1933 was the Nazi attempt to convert the seizure of power under the sign of race into a form of the state founded on exactly the same sign. The coming to consciousness and aristocratic ‘being for itself’ promised by the swastika was a representation which could only be sustained by the negative action involved in boycotting Jewish shops, burning books, imprisoning and murdering opponents and finally declaring war. Although Nazi ideology privileged the Volk over the state, this same notional Volk could only be supported by state repression. Only a year after Bataille wrote his essay, this point was made clearly and forcibly by John Heartfield in one of his anti-Nazi photomontages, The Old Slogan in the ‘New’

Reich: Bloodand Iron of 8 March 1934 (Plate 19). Heartfield’s image, which strips away the autokinetic rhetoric of race to reveal the repressive political machinery that supported it, shows four axe blades bound crudely together in the shape of a swastika. This photomontage had appeared in the exiled Communist newspaper AIZ (Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung or Workers’ Illustrated Paper), and Heartfield introduced a double historical reference, relating the recent beheading of four Communists by the Nazis to Bismarck’s declaration of 1862 that ‘Blood and Iron’ were the means to German unity. Douglas Kahn has suggested that this photomontage was ‘generalised to mean that nothing had changed since Bismarck, the stability of the nationcommunity was being gained only through barbarism’.⁴¹ Heartfield meant this and much more, since he had succeeded in making the swastika historical and historically specific, thus annihilating the ahistoric illusion of Aryanism.

In examination of the semiotic potency of this photomontage, it is worth noting the distinctions that George L.Mosse has drawn between Bismarckian Realpolitik and Nazism. For Mosse, the message of Bismarck’s ‘Blood and Iron’

bluntly asserted the power of the state in contrast to the more abstract and spiritual unity of the Volk sought by romantic nationalism.⁴² In this respect, Heartfield’s image functioned as an X-ray that revealed the apparatus of state terror supporting ‘the struggle for the…victory of the Aryan man’. And in successfully subverting these illusions, Heartfield’s image of protest co-opted the means and the scale of their dissemination. AIZ had the third largest circulation of any illustrated magazine in the Weimar republic and continued to publish from

exile in Prague until Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. In this way Nazi mass-media propaganda encountered anti-Nazi mass-mass-media polemic. Heartfield was later to say that:

My montage ‘Blood and Iron’ showing four bloody hatchets bound together in the form of a swastika, was one of the montages which became famous because of the little A-I-Z booklet and appeared as graffiti on stone walls and was reproduced on mimeographed pamphlets.⁴³

The image ‘caught on’ in a wider sense, since Resistance movements in Germany began to deface Nazi swastikas by adding curved lines for the axe blades and jagged lines for the blood. The Nazi swastikas that had ‘appeared on walls and bridges everywhere’ had now met their match in the ‘graffiti on stone walls’ which became icons of anger and resistance.

Heartfield’s image scored against Nazism on a number of counts, the most important of which is its visual rather than verbal iconoclasm. Heartfield was not interested in the issue of verbal content and cultural context for the swastika, since that would have left the visible image intact. Earlier in 1934, in the 25 January issue of AIZ, an article had appeared with the title ‘A German Symbol?’ showing the swastika on a Buddha, a Javanese Puppet and a Russian banknote: this represented a laudable attempt to replace the swastika within a structural signifying system, but it is a Marxist critique which might have been better addressed to Heinrich Schliemann, since by 1934 the swastika had become its own autonomous signifying system. The repression and dictatorship which supported the symbol of the swastika instituted a situation where both ideological and semiotic difference was superfluous and only one sign was required. In terms of visual politics at least, Bataille’s ‘sovereign law of value’

had now been instituted in the structure of the sign, a ‘being for itself’ which was to be referred only to itself and not to its place (‘having to be’) in a signifying system. Goebbels’ laws of 1933 were designed to shore up the self-referentiality of the swastika, and to protect the totalising ‘National Symbol’ from the economic relativism of the commercial sign and the commodity law of value. In these regulations, the connection between repression and racism is made explicit:

the supersession of relative differences, whether economic, political or semiotic, introduced the rule of the singular and exclusive difference which is the illusion that racism requires.

To subvert Nazism required not the ascription of a different meaning to some ideal and non-Nazi swastika but a ‘disfiguring’ of the visual chain which linked image to image. The swastika would have to be made non-uniform and ‘unlike itself’. This was precisely what was accomplished by the graffiti which followed the publication of the Blood and Iron photomontage. Heartfield not only introduced historical and representational codes into the self-identity of the Nazi swastika, he thereby reintroduced the proscribed politics of communism into Nazi Germany. The four axes became a reactionary, parodic and distorted

version of the ideology of productive labour represented in the hammer and sickle. The labour of Nazism as shown in Blood and Iron is meaningless, destructive and unproductive: its sole function is to support the race ‘idea’. The primitive machinery of the four axes prefigures the machinery of the death camps, and the blood on the axes becomes the blood of the victims of the Nazi terror rather than the Aryan blood promoted by National Socialist propaganda.

The polar opposite of John Heartfield’s reworking of the Nazi swastika is provided by the chapter devoted to the swastika by the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich in The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Reich felt free to begin again with the swastika at the point where Schliemann started, using the image as a point of origin and the palimpsest for a self-interested interpretation and neo-Freudian

‘free association’. Predictably, Reich’s exegesis of the swastika devolved upon the question of sexuality, and the repression of sexual energies in the form of

‘reactionary mysticism’. He claimed that the Nazis were aware of the lure of the secrecy in mysticism and religion, and that they knew how to manipulate it: ‘an understanding of fascist ideology’, he claimed, ‘is not possible without a study of the psychological effect of mysticism in general.’⁴⁴ Reich argued that Nazi manipulation had amplified the potential ‘Fascist psychology’ of the individual into a mass movement. He referred to the deliberate use of ambiguity and obfuscation in National Socialist phraseology, the purpose of which was the

‘management of the mystical feeling of the masses’.⁴⁵

This theory was the starting point for Reich’s discussion of the swastika, provoked by the question: ‘why does the symbol lend itself so well to the provocation of mystical feelings?’⁴⁶ He attempted to answer this question by using the familiar idea of an ‘original meaning’ for the swastika, and in doing so merely reified the mystical secrecy he had wished to dispel. Again the swastika was described as an image with a hidden identity, and a secret purpose or intention. This identity, Reich claimed, was wholly sexual, a fact of which Hitler was unaware when he chose the image. By a circuitous route that recalls Schliemann’s elaborate explanations, Reich’s argument leads us from the original meaning to Hitler’s ‘victory of the idea of creative work’:

The swastika, then, was originally a sexual symbol. In the course of time, it took on diverse meanings, among others that of a mill-wheel, that is of work. The original emotional identity of work and sexuality explains a finding of Bilmans and Pengerots on the mitre of St Thomas à Becket. It is a swastika with the following inscription, ‘hail earth, mother of man. Grow great in the embrace of God, fruitful to nourish mankind’.⁴⁷

This was a rather different interpretation of the ‘machinery’ of the Nazi swastika than that suggested by John Heartfield, although both Heartfield and Reich found a use for the autokinetic aspect of the image. Reich’s analysis rapidly became more specific; he saw in the swastika not just a nexus of sexuality/work in

general but the particular and ‘unmistakable’ representation of a copulating couple:

A look at the swastikas on page eighty-six will show them to be a schematic but unmistakable presentation of two intertwined human bodies.

The swastika at left represents the sexual act in the recumbent position, the one at right in the standing position.⁴⁸

This apotheosis of absurd interpretations of the swastika was an attempt to expose the ‘mass psychological problem’ of mysticism as repressed sexuality, by exposing the true sexual meaning beneath the mystical allure. In the effectiveness of the image of the swastika, Reich saw a substratum at work;

specifically sexual, but dependent on the model of a definite yet invisible

‘symbolic content’ completing the visible image. His theory does not encounter the possibility of a fetishistic and displaced eroticism of the surface rather than a

‘symbolically’ encoded depth. Reich also offered experimental evidence to support the theory that the swastika ‘represents the sexual act’:

This effect of the swastika on unconscious emotional life is, of course, not the reason for the success of fascist mass propaganda: but it is a potent stimulant. Random tests with people of either sex and of various ages and social positions showed that only very few people failed to recognise the meaning of the swastika: most people recognised it sooner or later.⁴⁹

Reich was prepared to go halfway with the swastika, recognising the role of mysticism, but as the censor of true meaning, not as a mystique of significance.

He concluded by saying that he had no wish to broadcast his discovery of the swastika’s sexual secret identity, since ‘the moral disguise would act as a defence against our attempt’. Elsewhere in his text, Reich does provide a description of the mechanics of mystical feeling which could be applied to the Nazi swastika, when he claims that we experience the same psychic reaction to grotesque fairy tales, mystery thrillers, Church services and nationalistic display.⁵⁰ That his own interpretation of the swastika could be seen as the fetishisation of the ‘mystery thriller’ of unmanifest content, of an apparently absent meaningful identity, is unfortunately not discussed. The lie perpetrated by the Nazi swastika was that there existed an identity to be recovered and a meaning to be found, and the fetishisation of the image as a totalitarian ‘sign field’ postponed that moment of completion indefinitely. The fact that a completion is required already signals its impossibility: Nazism’s answer was to continue to reproduce the sign and to extend the territorial boundary which it demarcated.