‘Context’ has become one of the shibboleths of recent anthropology and archaeology. Marxist notions of economy and structuralist ideas of a system of differences are applied on a micro-level to place material symbols within their
‘context’. Ian Hodder has suggested that without context, archaeology becomes mere antiquarianism, and claims that:
An object out of context is not readable; and a symbol painted on a cave wall when there are no deposits in the cave, when there are no deposits in the region that contain other depictions of the symbol on other objects, and when there are no graves containing the symbol, is scarcely more readable.107
The symbol ‘out of context’ is readable; here it is ‘read’ as a contradiction in terms, the collision of context and non-context. The image on the wall can stand either as the barrier to an interpretation within the existing context, or as the gateway to an alternative interpretation and the possibility of an entirely different context within which it would make perfect sense. As a ‘barrier’ the image would tend to emphasise rather than invalidate the self-consistency of the established context, yet as ‘gateway’ the symbol in the cave could also be seen as the sign at the birth of a new regime of meaning and a refutation of the old. On the other hand, like Loos’ grafitti on the toilet wall, such a sign might also constitute an empty and redundant gesture of defiance around which no new structures could form: but the lack of a sociological background or history for the author of the gesture does not make the sign any less readable against its immediate surroundings. A consideration of how material symbols as a ‘figure’
are enmeshed in their contextual ‘ground’ must be augmented by recognising the possibility that they are placed in tension with it.
The cross-cultural study of the swastika which follows is based neither on the self-defeating practice of comparing one meaning to another, nor on the idea that the image simply reflects a structured set of relationships, but instead examines the tensions that are set up between one structure and another: between a self-identical ‘swastika structure’ and one in which the symbolic motif is sublimated within a system of differences. It is intended to constitute a visual and scalar, rather than an absolute, basis for a distinction between the modes of ‘symbol’
and ‘ornament’ and to suggest that in order to develop a visual construction of the symbolic marker, it is necessary to heighten the disjunction between locality and field.
Henrietta Moore, in her study of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic philosophy as applied to material culture, has proposed a model for placing the material figure within its contextual ground:
We could take, for example, the problem of decorative designs on a pot.
On the ‘first’ level we have the individual motif (word), on a ‘second’
level we can identify design sequences (sentences) and on a ‘third’ level we should consider the decorated pot as a whole (text).108
In this instance, a linguistic metaphor is used to imply that signification can only occur within a structuring system in which all the parts stand in a coherent relationship to the whole. Moore has also noted that in the model she outlines above, any ‘polysemic’ vagueness of meaning in the motif is screened out by its being included in the ‘sentence’ of the design sequence, so that it is limited to a single (‘monosemic’) meaning. The polysemy of the individual unit in isolation corresponds to Ian Hodder’s symbol in the cave, which can only be understood as potentially meaningful, insofar as it suggests alternative ‘sentences’ and ultimately alternative texts.
Yet within this model, there also remains the possibility of employing the motif in such a way as to suppress the existing structure of meaning, without thereby instituting an alternative monosemy or reinstituting a previous polysemy. This would occur were we to isolate the motif from the syntactical system of the ‘sentence’ and replace it with simple repetition or multiplication.
Such a substitution would have the effect of replacing both the ‘polysemic’
overflow of the disembodied motif and the ‘monosemic’ limitations of the design sequence with a system in which meaning would exist in the relationship of the individual motif to a multiplied field of similar motifs, an interrelationship which would consequently be vying with the larger field or area represented by the object/text. Rather than functioning as a landmark, each individual symbol then configures an alternative ‘landscape’ of signs. In this instance the polysemic or
‘poetic’ symbol has been rhetoricised, and its potential for alternative meaning can be used as a method of simultaneously controlling the space of the object and subduing existing ‘readings’. The symbol as the imaginative catalyst for a new context has been transformed into a totalising framework for the control of the existing one. This is the model I am proposing for the Nazi swastika, one in which Nolte’s symbol of ‘salvation and hope’ becomes a totalitarian sign field.
The following examples propose that the swastika as it occurs in the micro-environment of an ornamental scheme can be employed as a model for the institution of the symbol as a method of asserting control over social space.
The first two examples are related geographically but not temporally, the second two belong to the same time and the same culture but were produced for entirely different reasons. Plate 11 shows a Hattian (pre-Hittite) ‘ritual standard’
made around 2300–2100BC, with swastikas arranged in a scheme of squares.109 It is in the collection of the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations, Ankara, and is one of the many funerary objects excavated from the graves of Alaca Hüyuk in northern Turkey. Plate 12 shows the carved stone doorway of the Karatay Medrese (Islamic school) in Konya, about fifty miles distant from the graves of Alaca Hüyuk, and completed around 1252.110 Chronologically distant, yet geographically close, the bronze ornament and the carved doorway exhibit roughly the same scheme of swastikas ‘turning’ alternately to the left and the right.
However, they differ fundamentally in their approaches to the motif: in the Hattian ornament the swastika is ‘rhetorical’, in the Seljuk doorway
‘syntactical’. In the Hattian device, the structural hierarchy of the ‘decorated object’ is displaced, since the object is simply a vehicle or frame for the repetition of the motif. This repetition of the symbol in the funeral object (further emphasised by the discrete swastikas dangling from the corners) becomes in the Karatay façade a process of dissolution through interconnection and interrelationship. In this doorway we can see, for example, either a pattern composed of swastikas or one made up of ‘stepped’ rhomboids. The ‘word’ of the individual swastika motif is still present, but subsumed in the dynamics of pattern: it is not singled out for attention, but instead has a role to play in the total geometric scheme. In Islamic art, the lack of a system of symbolism based
on the one-to-one relationship between signifier and signified has puzzled some art historians, and has been attributed to a reluctance to adopt a Christian style of iconography.111 Other authorities, however, view in a more positive light the Islamic emphasis on the symbolism of the whole decorative scheme rather than the isolated motif. Titus Burckhardt refers to a process of ‘levelling out’, in which ancient symbols are adopted and transformed:
It levels them out in a certain sense, and thereby eliminates any magical qualities they may have possessed… Islam assimilates these archaic elements and reduces them to their most abstract and generalised formations…in return, it endows them with a fresh intellectual lucidity, one might say—with spiritual elegance.112
The swastika was one such ‘archaic element’ absorbed by Islam in its progress and conquests, although the appearance of the swastika in early Islamic pattern is primarily ascribed to Graeco-Roman and Byzantine influence, suggesting that a certain amount of ‘levelling out’ had already taken place.
There is a parallel here with the distinction that Worringer drew between the treatment of the individual motif in Gothic and Classical ornament. When he discusses the ‘revolving wheel’ in Formprobleme der Gotik, Worringer had already established a contrast between the overall symmetry of Classical ornament and the repetition of asymmetrical motifs in northern styles. Where the repetition of a motif occurs in Classical ornament, Worringer argued, it is resolved into harmony within a greater scheme of balanced mirror symmetry:
It is true that the repetition of a single motif plays its part in Classical ornament also: but…is of an entirely different nature. In Classical ornament, there is a general inclination towards repetition of the selected motive [sic] the opposite way round, as in a mirror, thereby avoiding the appearance of endless progression produced by repetition…
By this repetition in reverse order…the hurrying, mechanical activity is, as it were, bridled… On the other hand, in Northern ornament repetition does not bear this restful character of addition, but has, so to speak, the character of multiplication.113
Worringer located the wheel motif in the northern tradition despite its element of symmetry, claiming that the difference between radial symmetry in the antique and rotational symmetry in the north was similar to that which exists between the balanced repetition of a motif and its mechanical or ‘simple’ repetition. For Worringer the ‘rotation without reflection’ of this form embodied the principle of simple repetition that governs all northern ornament in microcosm: ‘in the one case there is quiet, measured, organic movement, in the other, the uninterrupted, accelerating, mechanical movement.’114 In Henrietta Moore’s terms, the ‘word’
of the self-signifying motif here constructs not a meaningful sentence but a
repetitious sequence, which imposes its own order on the architectural and environmental text. Every architectural surface and every gaze is controlled by the imposition of an identical design.
The third example I have chosen is a sheet of drawings from the Pedagogical Sketchbook of the artist Paul Klee (Plate 13).115 A single swastika had in fact been used as part of the emblem of the first Bauhaus at Weimar, but in this analysis of ‘dynamics based on the square and the triangle, in part related to the circle’, Klee developed the image of the swastika as a visual ‘theme’ with fifteen variations. He begins with the horizontally grounded four-armed swastika, and proceeds to an image resembling the Nazi ‘slanted’ variety (Klee noted that this is the ‘best position of the swastika from the dynamic point of view’).116 The direction of apparent rotation is then reversed, and in drawing number ten the three-armed triskelion makes an appearance, and is explored along similar lines.
For a full critical understanding of these images, it is not sufficient simply to refer to Klee’s description, and say that in this sheet of drawings he sees the swastika as a ‘form’ and not as a symbol. What requires elucidation is the way that this approach to form differs from the ‘abstract and generalised formations’
of Islamic pattern that Titus Burckhardt has described. Referring again to Henrietta Moore’s model, we can see in Paul Klee’s drawings a visual equivalent to the polysemic ‘overflow’ of the individual motif. Freed from both the limitations placed on it in the syntax of the design ‘sentence’ and the repetition of the identical in rhetoric, the swastika is shown in fifteen ludic transformations.
In contrast to the images of play, différance and transformation in Klee’s sketchbook, my fourth example is of the swastika as it was used in the Nazi spectacle. Plate 14 is a photograph of the ‘Day of German Art’ in Munich on 15 October 1933. The original caption read: ‘On the Day of German Art, streets everywhere are full of happy and ceremonial decorative flags (Fahnenschmuckes).’117 The use of the word ‘decorative’ in connection with the Nazi emblem here implies something given, the natural or logical supplement of object and context. It is such an interpretation that allows for an eventual structuralist reading in the reverse direction, from the motif to the context which
‘produced’ it.
I am suggesting a more critical look at the relationship between this photograph and its accompanying text. The words ‘happy’, ‘ceremonial’ and
‘decorative’ are there to sugar the pill of the totalitarian Gleichschaltung of 1933, and to naturalise the imposition of a geometry of the swastika on the geometry of the streets. I would again argue that this ‘decoration’, this rhetoric of ornament, is here being used to screen out the existing ontology of object, context and environment and suppress any other texts which might have supplemented them. The functionality of objects and the negotiability of spaces remains unaffected: even under Nazism, a pot is a pot. But the contextual meaning of the object is disturbed by the overstamping of the Germanic swastika.
Henceforth all objects must question their identity relative to this overall scheme: Germanic art, Germanic cars, Germanic clothes. The supplementary and
connotative roles of ornament and symbol are brought together in one image which functions as a single commodifying stamp:
it was repeated constantly in an astonishing variety of forms: the swastika as flag, bunting, armband as expected but also as altar cloth, silver paperweight, fan decoration, cover of sheet music for the Horst Wessell song, on goblets, cutlery, children’s swapcards and books, a toy to be assembled in the kindergarten, embroidered pillows, toys, mantelpiece and wall decorations, wallpaper and decals—these are just some of the uses of the swastika.118
The image reinforcement achieved by the kindergarten toy is at work in another photograph from the annual Das Jahr, bearing the caption ‘Saarbrücken was a single sea of flags’.119 It shows a group of young children giving the Hitler salute beneath a canopy of hundreds of swastikas printed on flags and bunting (Plate 15). This photograph shows the completion of the circuit between the image of the swastika and an appropriately Germanic response to it, a circuit which was being constructed as far back as 1871. The ‘over-stamping’ of the swastika is as much a mental as a physical phenomenon, but the response is here being instituted as a physical reflex. The swastika that was transforming architecture and objects into Germanic commodities also appears in the form of the body. The recognition of the image is coupled with a set of learned acknowledgements and gestures which, far from acting as a ‘context’ for the swastika, simply redouble the image’s own self-reflexivity. The swastika as the visual rehearsal of the interpenetration of Führer and Volk is the key element in a set of collectively rehearsed gestural representations and their spoken equivalent (‘Heil Hitler’) which all form part of the same circuit.