E.H.Gombrich has compared Wilhelm Worringer’s opinions on the Gothic to those of Oswald Spengler, and referred to his ‘vulgarised and sensationalised’
writing which made the idea of ‘Gothic man’ popular currency.49 Whether or not one agrees with this assessment, there is no doubt that Worringer’s theories proved to be in tune with certain tendencies in early twentieth-century German romanticism. In 1908, the same year that Adolf Loos wrote ‘Ornament and Crime’, Worringer achieved unprecedented success with the publication of his doctoral dissertation Abstraktion und Einfühlung (Abstraction and Empathy) which, as he reveals in the foreword to the 1948 edition ‘has probably run into more editions than any doctorate thesis’. There is a certain symmetry between the reasons Worringer gave for the success of Abstraction and Empathy and the subject of his book, which is particularly concerned with the idea of decorative style as the litmus test for the psyche of a period or culture. He also employed the idea of a Zeitgeist to explain the popularity of the book, describing himself as
‘the medium of the necessities of the period’.50 His assessments of psychological states as revealed in ornament are based on the idea of differing propensities amongst various cultures and races for the two basic values of Abstraction and Empathy. Worringer defined the former as anti-material and transcendental, the latter as relating to a recognition by an organism of the organic, and the subsequent ability to ‘lose oneself’ in empathy with this likeness. He describes northern European ornament in general, and the Gothic style in particular, as a hybrid of Abstraction and Empathy, in which heightened expression and
‘livingness’ is lent to abstract and unliving form:
It is not the life of an organism that we see before us, but that of a mechanism. No organic harmony surrounds the feeling of reverence toward the world, but an ever growing and self-intensifying restless striving without deliverance sweeps the inwardly inharmonious psyche away with it…into a fervent excelsior.51
The implied autokinesis in the symmetry of the ‘revolving wheel’ provided Worringer with a concrete example of the ‘animation of the inorganic’ that he defined as the essential quality of the Gothic. The swastika provides one example of such an autokinetic ‘trick’ or deception in which a stationary object is apparently in motion. Gombrich discusses this quality of the swastika in The Sense of
Order, and ascribes it to the phenomenon of ‘visual redundancy’ described by Gestalt theory. We look, claims Gombrich, for order and pattern in our visual environment; where one kind of order is not present, we will search for others. In the swastika what is first of all noticed is the lack of mirror symmetry, which is the most ‘predictable’ variety of symmetry in our experience. He then describes how we perform an ‘imaginary rotation’ on the figure of the swastika, in an attempt to establish whether each of the four arms is identical to the others: this is proved, but the search never stops, and in this way the illusion of perpetual motion is established: ‘we follow, I believe, not with the eyes but with the mind.’
In view of Worringer’s dialectic of Abstraction and Empathy, it is noteworthy that Gombrich equates the absence of mirror symmetry in the swastika with the recognition of an organic type of order: we will ‘empathise’ with mirror symmetry in images and objects because it is the symmetry of our own bodies.
When we encounter the hybrid of rotational symmetry and bilateral asymmetry that is present in the swastika, however, a different reaction occurs:
Hence, perhaps, the compulsion to test by mental rotation these puzzling forms which are both alike and different. Rotational symmetry represents an order which is visually less easy to grasp. I hope it is a pardonable exaggeration to say that it is not the motif which is unbalanced but that it upsets the balance of our mind. Random shapes do not produce this effect, it arises from the clash between our sense of order and a visible regularity which eludes the basic laws of simplicity, the first for which we test our environment.52
Gombrich is dismissive of Worringer and what he regards as his ‘marketplace’
Gothic: yet in the passage quoted above, a very similar phenomenology is applied to the swastika as a hybrid form which is ‘both alike and different’.
Implied in this description is the idea that the swastika is not ‘animated’ in the same way that we are, and that its autokinesis is somehow unnatural. Compare Gombrich’s ‘compulsion to test’ and ‘upsets the balance of our mind’ with Worringer:
It is impossible to mistake the restless life contained in this tangle of lines.
This unrest, this seeking, has no organic life that draws us gently into its movement; but there is life there, a tormenting, urgent life that compels us joylessly to follow its movements. Thus on an inorganic fundament there is heightened movement, heightened expression… The inner need for life and empathy of these inharmonious peoples did not take the nearest-at-hand path to the organic…it needed rather the intensification of a resistance, it needed that uncanny pathos which attaches to the animation of the inorganic.53
In this instance, Worringer did not refer to the revolving wheel but to Gothic interlaced strapwork ornament. And in discussing the swastika, Gombrich does not refer to the Gothic. But their descriptions of the effects of hybrid, unnatural and yet animated forms bear many points of similarity. There is compulsion rather than affirmation, and an ‘inhuman’ order and dynamism. Gombrich, like Max Müller before him, notes the ‘puzzling’ aspect of the swastika and similar motifs, Worringer suggested that northern man may have actively sought the difficulties and the ‘resistance’ to Empathy that hybrid forms present. Gombrich, however, would not claim that a preference for such motifs could be racially contingent. But having established the idea that the swastika unbalances the mind, it would not be going too much further to say that an unbalanced mind might be able to share an unnatural ‘empathy’ with it. Worringer described Gothic man experiencing ‘the same logical frenzy, the same methodical madness’54 that Gombrich sees in the endless mental chase around the form of the swastika.
One obvious weakness of such a thesis is that it is at the mercy of absolutes, of declaring that in all circumstances, from Buddhism to Nazism, the form of the swastika will be regarded with unease and distress by onlookers. This is manifestly not the case: Gombrich, in his discussion of the idea of ‘the logic of situations’ as applied to ornamental style, has warned that we should be wary of seeing the choice of styles or motifs as the necessary condition of some embracing Zeitgeist, but that attention should instead be paid to which aspects of form, whether that be asymmetry, clarity or flatness, are the subject of emphasis in particular instances, and which therefore promote a particular position or confirm cognitive patterns and habits of thought.55
Thomas Wilson’s view that the swastika was distinct from ‘more easily made’
forms confirms Gombrich’s distinction between the uncanny or disturbing order of the swastika and ‘random shapes’. Despite this similarity, Wilson, unlike Gombrich, denied that the swastika appeared to move, and his refutation of its autokinesis was underlined by the horizontally placed image which appeared as a heraldic device on the first page of his book, and which emphasised the more stable ‘cross’ and ‘square’ aspect of the swastika rather than the wheel or the vortex. Wilson had rejected Count Goblet D’Alviella’s assertion that the swastika is an ideal representation of the perpetuum mobile and all that ‘moves of itself’:
An objection is made to the theory or hypothesis presented by Count Goblet D’Alviella, that it is not the cross part of the Swastika that represents the sun, but its bent arms, which show the revolving motion…the author is more in accord with Dr Brinton and others that the Swastika is derived from the cross and not from the wheel, that the best arms do not represent rotary or gyratory motion, and that it had no association with, or relation to, the circle.56
This debate might appear as pointless as the search for a perpetuum mobile, but it does indicate that the ‘wheel or square?’ aspect of the swastika’s hybrid form is a riddle that might be visually ‘solved’ by placing emphasis on one aspect or the other. In the Nazi design, as I have already mentioned, the swastika is placed in a dynamic square which situates it at a point of transition between these two poles, lending it a transfixed (and perceptually transfixing) quality which coerces and paralyses the gaze more effectively than the spiralling or wheel-like motion which Worringer describes. Roland Barthes has likened the spiral to a poetic phrase, ‘a return in difference, not a repetition in identity’.57 The endless
‘displacement’ of meaning to which Barthes refers also characterises the poetic ambition of romanticism, but in Worringer’s text, we see romanticism decaying into atrophy: his ‘revolving wheel’ still has a morbid half-life, but his emphasis on identical repetition replaces an organism with a mechanism. In Nazism, the atrophy is complete: in its swastika, the image of an arrested motion and a stillborn romanticism was offered as the emblem of ‘national awakening’.