July 29, 2000
THINK TANK / By SARAH BOXER
One of the World´s Great Symbols Strives for a Comeback
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Friends of the Swastika
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Should the swastika be rehabilitated? For centuries it stood for good luck. Above, for instance, Jacqueline Bouvier wore one as a young girl.
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t's a simple question: Can the swastika ever be
redeemed?
Before the Nazi party adopted the swastika and
turned it into the most potent icon of racial hatred, it
traveled the world as a good luck symbol. It was known
in France, Germany, Britain, Scandinavia, China, Japan, India and the United States. Buddha's footprints
were said to be swastikas.
Navajo blankets were woven with swastikas. Synagogues in North Africa, Palestine and Hartford were built with swastika mosaics.
Now there is a small movement afoot to help "the
swastika get on with its benign life," to separate it
from "the sins of the Nazis." Is that really possible?
Should it be possible?
The swastika gets its name from the Sanskrit
word svastika, meaning well-being and good fortune.
The earliest known swastikas date from 2500 or 3000
B.C. in India and in Central Asia.
A 1933 study suggests that the swastika migrated from India across
Persia and Asia Minor to Greece, then to Italy and on
to Germany, probably in the first millennium B.C.
The fateful link was made by the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann. From 1871 to 1875, Schliemann excavated the site of Homer's Troy on the
shores of the Dardanelles. When he found artifacts
with swastikas, he quickly associated them with the
swastikas he had seen near the Oder River in Germany. As Steven Heller, the art director of The New York
Times Book Review, writes in "The Swastika: Symbol
Beyond Redemption," "Schliemann presumed that the
swastika was a religious symbol of his German ancestors which linked ancient Teutons, Homeric Greeks
and Vedic India."
Pretty soon swastikas were everywhere, rotating
both clockwise and counterclockwise. Madame Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society, included
the swastika in the seal of the society. "Rudyard
Kipling combined a swastika with his signature in a
circle as a personal logo," Mr. Heller reports. And the
swastika was part of the logo of the Bauhaus, under
Paul Klee.
The swastika spread to the United States, too.
Coca-Cola issued a swastika pendant. Carlsberg beer
etched swastikas onto its bottles. During World War I,
the American 45th Infantry division wore an orange
swastika as a shoulder patch. At least one train line
had swastikas on its cars.
The Girls' Club published a
magazine called The Swastika. And until 1940 the Boy
Scouts gave out a swastika badge.
How did the Nazis get hold of it? According to Mr.
Heller, the Germanen order, an anti-Semitic group
that wore helmets with Wotan horns and plotted
"against Jewish elements in German life," used a
curved swastika on a cross as its insignia. By 1914, the
Wandervogel, a militarist German youth movement,
made it a nationalist emblem.
The Nazi party claimed it around 1920. In "Mein
Kampf," Hitler, who had artistic aspirations as well as
political ones, described "his quest to find the perfect
symbol for the party." He toyed with the idea of using
swastikas. But it was Friedrich Krohn, a dentist from
Starnberg, who designed the flag with a black swastika
in its center. "Hitler's major contribution," Mr. Heller
writes, "was to reverse the direction of the swastika"
so that it appears to spin clockwise.
The swastika came down as quickly as it ascended. In 1946 it was constitutionally banned from any
public display in Germany. In the United States there
has never been a law prohibiting the display of
swastikas, but the aversion is still there.
The question now is, should the swastika be reclaimed from the Nazis or should it, as Mr. Heller
argues, continue to represent their "unspeakable
crimes"?
The issue is complicated by the swastika's history
in India and other parts of Asia, where it has none of
the connotations it has in the West. In India there is
Swastik soap; in Malaysia, a Swastika photograph
studio; in Japan there are Pokémon cards that have
"manji," counterclockwise swastikas; in China, the
Falun Gong uses the counterclockwise swastika as its
emblem.
And now swastikas have crept back into sight in
the Western world.
In the 1960's, for example, the
swastika was a recurring motif in geometric abstract
art and hard-edge painting, notably in an exhibition at
the Guggenheim Museum.
But the most concerted effort to redeem the
swastika comes from Friends of the Swastika, a group
formed in 1985 and based in the United States. The
group, whose Web site promises that it "has no connections to any racist propaganda" and no intention of
denying the Holocaust, is led by an artist named
ManWoman who claims to have 200 swastikas tattooed
on his body. In order to "detoxify" and "resanctify"
the swastika, the group sells T-shirts, stamps, postcards and "other cool stuff" with swastikas. Their
watchword is, "To hell with Hitler!"
And already, they say, their mission is working.
"The swastika is re-emerging in the alternative pop
culture . . . in the punk rock world, in the flying saucer
cults, in the street gangs." There are teenagers wearing swastikas just because they think they look cool.
"In the 1973 film 'Sleeper,' " Mr. Heller notes,
"Woody Allen sarcastically predicted that in the distant future, the swastika will be worn as a fashion
accessory." The distant future is now.
It has become an icon of rebellion. The logo for ZZ
Flex skateboards looks a lot like a swastika. The label
on the heavy metal CD Sacred Reich has interlocking
swastikas. The logo for the band Kiss, which originally
had three Jewish members, was made to look just like
the insignia of the SS -- not quite a swastika but rather
two parallel, jagged s's made to look like lightning.
Does it matter whether people use a swastikain
ignorance, in hatred or to rehabilitate it? No, Mr.
Heller says: "Nazi icons were strong enough to seduce
a nation and still contain a graphic power that can be
unleashed today." The swastika defenders counter
with the question: "How can a symbol be guilty for the
acts of a madman?"