That the Nazi swastika should be seen as a reactionary sign is entirely correct, although not in the sense of a romanticism reactionary to rationality, but in the same way as Hegel’s symbol, which struggles instead against the inevitable failure of its declared aims. On the other hand, the sledgehammer tactics of Lukács’ The Destruction of Reason, which, as the title suggests, implied that Nazism was another example of the ‘modern irrationalism…[which] arose and became operative in perpetual conflict with materialism and the dialectical method’23 represents an ideologically over-determined simplification. Lukács instituted the paradox of a programmatic and consciously oppositional
‘irrationality’ and evoked an eternal fight to the death between fascism and communism. It could also be argued that the variety of romantic irrationality which bore fruit in Nazism was rather a type of arationality whose agenda was already a manifest impossibility, and whose ‘destruction’ was self-accomplished and programmed in from the start. The lack of substance and meaning which Lukács detected in Germanic ‘irrationalism’ was not opposed to some concrete reality of the ‘crucial class struggle’ but instead fixed and hypostasised a moment of loss, and constitutes, like Hegel’s symbol, a mimesis or illustration of its own internal ‘struggle’. If the early swastika, as Nolte claims, fixed German minds on the theme of ‘salvation and hope’ then it also reified and confirmed the feelings of national despair on which such vain hope grew. A presage of this emblem is Zmigrodski’s ‘anti-Semitic’ swastika, which ostensibly stood for the struggle of one race against another, but was in reality the landmark for a prehistoric Mutterepoche so remote that the longing for it could only remain perpetually unsatisfied.
Similarly, the modern ornament is not anti-functional but anti-ornament, a parody of tradition and not its standard-bearer or successor. Its form therefore, is that of the architectural grotesque, which must be seen not as the deviation from a canon of visual beauty but as a figure which, as the architect Peter Eisenmann has suggested, represents an impossible relationship: ‘No longer does the object need to look ugly or terrifying to provoke an uncertainty; it is now the distance
between object and subject—the impossibility of possession which provokes this anxiety.’24 In the Nazi swastika, the binding threads of folk ornament were distorted into the modern abstraction and lowest common denominator of ‘race’, the wasted labour contained in industrialised ornamental forms25 was represented as an effortless or magical ‘creative work’, and Loos’ notion of primitive sexual desire was transformed into the auto-erotic space and indefinite time of the spectacle. The critic Matthias Winzen has suggested that the heroic public statuary of sculptors such as Arno Brecker, who worked for the Nazi regime, possessed a quality of suppressed and unfulfillable homoerotic desire which recruited ‘the viewer’s physical body as living raw material for military action’.26 The dynamic yet ‘endless’ form of the Nazi swastika, as well as its links with a romantic concept of interminable struggle, fulfil a similar role of transforming auto-eroticism into military aggression. In this regard it is worth noting the qualities of visual ‘requisition’ and ‘unnatural satisfaction’ that Worringer attributes to the endless and self-generative character of Gothic ornament. In the Nazi swastika, the cultural trajectory which Loos plotted is carried to its logical conclusion: modern ornament becomes purely aesthetic, existing only in the image state, and is thus transformed into symbol, a ‘purely symbolic’ (and so redundant) gesture. This erotic/organic ersatz in the form of an image also explains why the Nazi swastika continues to function as effective pornography, a lineage which can again be traced back to Zmigrodski’s scopophiliac substitution of the fetishised swastika for the absent mother.
Of course, the Nazi sign is not regarded as an aesthetic or idealised image, rather the moral order of civilisation and barbarity that Loos used when he contrasted modern man with the tattooed savage is recapitulated in the mixture of right-thinking revulsion and prurient fascination that the sign of the swastika now provokes. The modern ornament of the swastika once again becomes an obscene scrawl on the toilet wall, the fascist obscenity that Julia Kristeva has defined as breaching the rationalist limits set by language, but which must logically result in a defensive rationality circumscribing itself still further.27 Yet a further obscenity of swastika graffiti lies in the way in which it underlines the violence and violation perpetrated by the Nazi sign. For Adolf Loos, any attempt to construct a modern ornament would not be a purposeful crime directed against an emergent modernism but a violation of ornament itself: in other words, a form of tomb-robbery in which an exhumed ‘tradition’ becomes grist to the mill of mass consumption.28 The process of deracination that Adolf Loos saw as unstoppable, and his appeal for a corresponding honesty of attitude towards ornament, was reversed in Adolf Hitler’s sign. As soon as war was declared against the un-Germanic, the Germanic itself is simultaneously declared null and void, and the rhetoric of ornament reveals that ornament is a lie. Hitler’s silencing of the Rosenberg vs Goebbels debate represented at once the negation and completion of the nationalist nostalgia implicit in both völkisch thought and ‘aesthetic’
Expressionism, a negation that had begun with his initial politicising of the romantic nationalist swastika in 1919.
The object of nostalgia is by definition unattainable, and the politicisation and militarisation of nostalgia can only constitute parody and self-mockery. The comparison I propose to draw between the Nazi swastika and the ‘revolving wheel’ motif described by Wilhelm Worringer is intentionally parodic, but it is a parody which is intended to illustrate the form of the grotesque, the figure which embodies Eisenmann’s ‘impossibility of possession’. Worringer himself identified the grotesque as the intangible ‘form within form’ of the Gothic:
‘Behind the visible appearance of a thing lurks its caricature, behind the lifelessness of a thing an uncanny, ghostly life, and so all actual things become grotesque.’29 It is also appropriate that this styleless style should be used to illuminate the similar Formprobleme posed by the hybrid nature of Nazi
‘aesthetics’. This cannot be accomplished art-historically by comparing, for example, the style of a Gothic cathedral with that of Albert Speer’s cathedral of searchlights, but through an assessment of the character ascribed to a Germanic racial ‘will’, which constitutes above all an emphasis on an exaggeration of differences between the Germanic form and those of other races. Worringer wrote of an ‘elementary Aryan grammar of line’ which developed into a
‘specifically Germanic idiom’.30 Adolf Loos threw light on this issue in a foreword to the 1931 edition of his essays. On this occasion Loos’ polemic was directed against the German ‘Gothic’ or Fraktur script, and the practice of capitalising nouns. Arguing against the way in which enforced habit is dressed up as custom, and the formal repetition of a sign is substituted for a living tradition, Loos wrote:
Besides having a German god, we also have a German script. And both are false… Jacob Grimm says, ‘it is unfortunate that this tasteless and depraved script [Fraktur] is identified as ‘German’ as if every fashionable abuse of ours ought to be stamped innately ‘German’ and freely commended’.31
For Loos, Fraktur was an example of a foreign import which had been hallowed by time into one of the ‘sacred artefacts of Germanness’. He also detected a tendency for the German to define itself by adopting as its own those forms which had been rejected or abandoned by other cultures. The Gothic script formed a line of defence between the German and the non-German, and its idiosyncratic form signified ‘Germanness’ only because it proclaimed its radical difference from other scripts. As Loos showed, morphological details and the question of style became less important than the rhetorical expression of a singular and exceptional character, which had the effect of alienating form from meaning. He declared that both the Gothic typeface and the capital noun had the same paralysing effect:
The rigid…practice of capitalising nouns has as its consequence the return of language to a barbaric state. This derives from the abyss that opens up in
the German mind between the written and the spoken word. It is impossible to utter a capital letter.32
The printed Fraktur typeface became the public expression of a national
‘character’ which Loos also saw as policing private communication. The capitalised noun ensures that even personal handwriting takes on a collectivised, nationalistic aspect: ‘when a German takes pen in hand, he can no longer write as he thinks, as he speaks.’ Those who write do not simply write in German, they write Germany. Discourses on the Aryan swastika in the nineteenth century showed that the image, like Fraktur, had begun to constitute a defensible Germanic space, a ‘pure form’ recognisably set apart from others. Fraktur has now fallen into desuetude, but the swastika is still being used as the typographic supplement and authenticating stamp of ‘Germanness’ on a text.
Wilhelm Worringer’s Formprobleme displayed a range of völkisch, proto-expressionist and romantic nationalist reflexes which were linked to the idea of the Gothic as a latent, secret force, a powerful but underground tradition. In embarking on a close reading of this by now generally ignored and politically dubious book, I have traced the literary tradition of the romanticised Gothic of which it is a part. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, in his survey of the links between Austrian and German occultism and Nazism, has shown how a version of the Gothic tradition which had developed in the secret rites of freemasonry became one of the cultic forms of nationalism in early twentieth-century Germany:
craft traditions became the allegories and symbols of a deistic and fraternal doctrine… It was in Germany, where the growth of deviant masonic rites was greatest owing to the profusion of mystical and theosophical sects, that Freemasonry became confused with a Templar heritage.33
The ‘deviant’ nature of the twentieth-century Gothic was revealed in Worringer’s ambivalent morphology. As Paul Frankl has noted, Worringer
‘shows no interest in ribs, and indeed, hardly any at all in “morphological”
details’ and is instead preoccupied with style as racial volition: ‘the thesis in question cannot be Gothic in the narrower historical sense but rather a secret, latent Gothic in the psychological sense.’34 This was the occultation of the Gothic, a graphological ‘seeing of the unseen’ and the textual description of a trans-historical inner form within an historically constituted architectural style.
Using Worringer’s graphological reading of the Gothic with reference to Nazism, I will work in the opposite direction: from the secret tradition and the romantic longing to its realisation in Nazism and beyond as an architectural and lavatorial grotesque.