Eric Hobsbawm’s leitmotifs of abstraction, ideology, false continuity and
‘negative definition’ all apply to Schliemann’s construction of the swastika.
However, what also needs to be examined is the nature of the relationship between India and Germany which allowed this remythologising of the image to take place. Karl Marx, in his letter on ‘The Future Results of the British Rule in India’66 of 1853, declared that ‘Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history’ a phrase that he might have been loath to apply to German society, despite his suggestion that his native land had theorised, rather than acted, itself into existence.67
In his letter on Britain’s Indian colonies, Marx proposed a theory which he was later to revise, advocating the Westernisation of India in order that the necessary conditions for proletarian revolution should come about. The guiding principle of Marx’s thought was that ‘History’ in the Hegelian sense is proper to Europe, and that India had not evolved towards dialectical perfection, but was an
‘unresisting and unchanging society’ whose fate was to be invaded and ruled, preferably by the Briton rather than the Turk, the Persian or the Russian.68
Despite this particularly broad and inviting path laid out by Marx, the British often had a problem grasping the sheer ‘otherness’ of Indian culture and its cognitive systems. Whereas Hegel, despite his opinion that Indian culture was irredeemably static, could find a raison d’être for what he saw as the surplus or
‘inadequate’ irrational element in its symbolism, other writers such as George Waring, in his Ceramic Art in Remote Ages, were frustrated by the perceived lack of consonance between the image of the Indian swastika and its absent meaning:
But neither in the hideous jumble of Pantheism—the wild speculative thought, the mystic fables, and perverted philosophy of life among the Buddhists—nor in the equally wild and false philosophy of the Brahmins…
do we find any precise explanation of the meaning attached to this symbol, although its allegorical intention is indubitable.69
One of the better known examples of British incomprehension in the face of Indian art was John Ruskin’s reaction to the Indian Mutiny of 1857. In his The Two Paths of 1859, Ruskin proposed a psycho-graphological equation between the abstract quality of Indian ornamental design and the alienated and savage mentality of its makers: ‘[Indian art] never represents a natural fact…it will not draw a man, but an eight armed monster; it will not draw a flower, but only a spiral or a zig-zag.’70 Later in his text Ruskin noted that ‘ornamentation of that lower kind is pre-eminently the gift of cruel persons’. His opinion was not shared by design innovators such as Owen Jones and Henry Cole, who saw in Indian ornament the ideal opportunity to unite abstract flat pattern with British manufacturing methods. For Ruskin, however, both India and Industry represented soulless alienation from the ‘natural fact’, and for him, as Partha Miller has noted, the self-referential spiral of Indian ornament was equivalent to the cog-wheels of the machine:
The dire warning given to the manufacturers was that, instead of basing themselves on a study of nature, if they designed decorative ornament
‘either in ignorant play of their own heartless fancy, as the Indian does, or according to the received application of heartless laws, as the modern European does…there is but one word for [them]—Death’.71
This equation of abstraction with death recurs as one element of Wilhelm Worringer’s hybrid and race-romantic conception of the Gothic, which will be examined in the following section. But for the present, it is sufficient to note that Ruskin’s analysis of an Indian morphology baulked at the very same element of abstract ‘meaninglessness’ that George Waring saw in the Indian swastika.
Ruskin’s appeal to a reference in an objective natural fact is the same appeal that Waring makes to an ‘allegorical intention’ hidden by the image.
In contrast, the German romantic tradition of the symbol celebrated this autonomy of the signifying image from a direct and definite reference. A reading of Hegel’s Aesthetics and his treatment of the ‘symbolic’ art of the East reveals how a romantic semiotics would possess many of the dialectically remedial characteristics which Hegel identifies as proper to the Oriental symbol, namely the qualities of ‘quest’, ‘fermentation’ ‘mysteriousness’, ‘sublimity’ and what can be read as an indefinite (mediating between finite and infinite) temporality.72 Hegel’s own definition of the romantic, it must be noted, did not fall into this category, since its transcendence was not that of the visible/individual to the invisible/sublime, but as Charles Karelis has noted ‘the unity of the whole objective realm with the common factor of individual subjects’.73 However, Hegel saw a surface similarity between the romantic and symbolic realms, with the essential distinction that ‘in romantic art, the Idea, the deficiency of which in the symbol brought with it deficiency of shape, now has to be perfected in itself as spirit and heart’.74 In other words, attempting to visualise the Absolute is a fruitless task. The ‘deficiency’ or ‘inadequacy’ of the Oriental symbol to the goals it has set for itself typifies the nature of the symbolic signifying image in general, which transcends a merely conventional relationship to meaning only to fall short of an essential unity with it. Rather than partaking of the missionary and Christian Aufhebung of Hegelian philosophy, an ‘overcoming’ in which sacrifice is eventually turned to the good, the swastika as both a Sanskrit word and a popular Hindu icon is instead an example of both the Indian aesthetic and the primitive symbolic form that Hegel had claimed could only offer a mimesis or ersatz of his Absolute Idea. In Indian art, he argued, no proper union of the concrete and the philosophical Absolute could occur, since all energy was transfixed at the level of an image which was a kind of iconolate heresy, misrepresenting the Absolute in the form of an indefinite visual extension. The autokinetic illusion of the swastika, in which the image may seem to be engaged in an indefinite but inconsequential motion, would also identify it as an example of this heresy.
Tension, anxiety, hybridity, a fruitless striving and a general Sturm undDrang are the hallmarks of Hegel’s symbolic mode of representation, which perfectly accomplishes its own defeat. The model he applies to Hindu art perhaps more accurately describes a Western cult of self-expression with its roots in the romantic idea of the symbol. Self-expression seeks to contain the subject in the object, and ontology in the image in the form of a representation of the irrepresentable, which, in Hegel’s terms, is ‘interpreted as if the Idea itself were present in them’.75 This ‘giving of the known the dignity of the unknown’ which the German poet and novelist Novalis saw as the defining characteristic of romanticism, indicates the desire for a secular transcendence, the frisson of expenditure within the economy of representation. The emphasis in German romantic aesthetics on the energetic struggle of becoming over the classical complacency of being exemplifies this attitude; furthermore, Hegel’s views on the ambiguous relationship between the symbol and its meaning suggests the
way in which a popular romantic nationalism could construct the symbol ahistorically. Since the symbol in this scheme is never either wholly arbitrary nor wholly consonant, its signifying image can occupy or have occupied several sites of meaning over time: ‘the symbolic shape contains yet other characteristics of its own utterly independent of that which the symbolic shape signified once.’76 In this way, the image presents itself as the multitude of possible things it may have meant and could mean, rather than the rational and historically situated value of what it actually does mean at a given moment, either in a conventional or an Absolute sense. Past and future are conflated in an experience of the sign in the present as a limitless potential: this is the hallmark of the kitsch romantic sublime. This ersatz of infinity is achieved, Hegel argues, in the mimetic quality of Indian art, in which the attempt is made to represent Absolute infinity as an indefinite visual extension: ‘the most obvious way in which Hindoo art endeavours to mitigate this distinction [between the naturalistic and the Absolute] is…by the measureless extension of its images…the measurelessness of time durations, or the reduplication of particular determinations.’77 This is an example of ‘the contradiction itself which passes for the true unification’ and which mitigates against the possibility of an historical development:
The Indians have proved themselves incapable of an historical interpretation of persons and events, because an historical treatment requires sang-froid in taking up and understanding the past on its own account in its actual shape with its empirical links, grounds, aims, and causes.78
Both the India of Hegel and Marx and Hobsbawm’s Germany stand accused of
‘ahistoricity’. Schliemann’s Aryan ancestors are not historically or empirically
‘traced’, they are ahistorically constructed, like Hobsbawm’s German nationalism. The swastika magically appears at Hissarlik unencumbered by a signified meaning and therefore free of history, and links are then forged between this image and the new Germany, a country now unified under Bismarck, and whose attachment to a centuries-old feudalism and aristocracy had been so strong as to circumvent Marx’s hopes for a bourgeois-inspired revolution in 1848. At the time of the uprising, Marx commented that The German Bourgeoisie had developed…so slowly, that it saw itself threateningly confronted by the proletariat…at the very moment of its threatening confrontation with feudalism and absolutism’.79 It is worth comparing these words with his vision of a colonised and dialectically perfected India in 1853:
‘When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch…then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.’80
In Marx’s terms, both India and Germany fail to achieve the necessary bourgeois ‘critical mass’ which will propel them into the stream of history. In Germany, the development is perceived as uneven, in India it is seen as completely
absent. Aryanism made it possible to accommodate both countries under a single sign of the swastika, a sign which expressed the racial/genetic continuity of a race, rather than the historical/evolutionary development of the revolutionary proletariat. In Fichte’s Addresses of 1807–8, his dialectic of an ancient Teutonic Europe and ‘ancient Asia’ is synthesised in a vision of the German state as a perpetuum mobile, running on the inexhaustible fuel of Aryan race energy:
Altogether different is the genuine German art of the State…it seeks from the very beginning, and as the very first and only element, a firm and certain spirit. This is for it the mainspring, whose life proceeds from itself, and which has perpetual motion; the mainspring which will regulate, and continually keep in motion, the life of society.81
Fichte’s image of the magical and self-generating machine was echoed by Adolf Hitler’s declaration that both the principle of race continuity and the principle of
‘creative work’ towards maintaining the race idea could be discerned in his dynamically slanted swastika, an image which combined India with industry in the mass manufacture of the sign in a way which even Ruskin could not have foreseen.