Leo Francis Hoye & Ruth Kaiser
The Migration and Reconstruction of a Symbol:
An Exploration in the Dynamics of Context
and Meaning across Cultures
Series A: General & Theoretical Papers
ISSN 1435-6473
Essen: LAUD 2006
Paper No. 662
Universität Duisburg-Essen
Leo Francis Hoye & Ruth Kaiser
University of Hong Kong (China) & Marketing Consultant Lahnstein (Germany)
The Migration and Reconstruction of a Symbol:
An Exploration in the Dynamics of Context
and Meaning across Cultures
Copyright by the authors
2006
Series A
General and Theoretical
Paper No. 662
Reproduced by LAUD
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Leo Francis Hoye & Ruth Kaiser
The Migration and Reconstruction of a Symbol:
An Exploration in the Dynamics of Context
and Meaning across Cultures
1. Introduction
“And what does it mean?”
Langdon always hesitated when he got this question. Telling someone what a
symbol “meant” was like telling them how a song should make them feel – it was
different for all people. A white Ku Klux Klan headpiece conjured images of
hatred and racism in the United States, and yet the same costume carried a
meaning of religious faith in Spain.
“Symbols carry different meanings in different settings”.
(Brown, 2004: 39)
In the Fall of 2003, in the immediate aftermath of the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory
Syndrome) outbreak, which (temporarily) devastated the Hong Kong population and its
economy, the retail industry was under considerable pressure to regain its market position
and to re-capture a much-depleted customer base. The economic downturn propelled many
businesses to adopt quite aggressive marketing campaigns, the most notorious of which was
the deployment by a Hong Kong textile company (www.Izzue.com) of the swastika and
attendant Nazi regalia in their autumn promotion of men’s casual clothing.
The marketing ploy provoked outrage amongst local and, especially, expatriate
communities; it lead to official representations from the German and Israeli Consulates, and
outright condemnation by the ever-vigilant Simon Wiesenthal Center in New York. In the
face of such local and international outcry, yet not without some delay, the fashion retailer
eventually backtracked and issued a public apology, before withdrawing its display and
associated merchandise.
The Izzue.com debacle offers a powerful case study for exploring how symbol as
Visual Pragmatic Act (VPA) means within the intercultural perspective of different sociocultural contexts of use, and how the redeployment of symbol, within new or unexpected
settings, is mediated by a matrix of interdependent discourse practices. These practices we
refer to as either contextual triggers or contextual drivers, depending on their salience in the
construction of meaning within a particular setting – in the present instance, Hong Kong,
China. The paper examines the visual and linguistic rhetoric which accompanies the VPA –
the display of Nazi regalia by a Hong Kong-based retailer – using as its starting point data
drawn from contemporary newspaper reports and editorials. The paper then explores the
discourse practices which underlie this visual event: local marketing and advertising
strategies; the symbology of the swastika; the writing about Dictatorship and media focus;
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the writing about Holocaust. In short, the paper deals with multi-modal discourses in an
intercultural perspective.
The swastika is iconography at its most graphically powerful: its ‘geometric purity
allows for legibility at any size and distance, and when on its axis, the whirling square gives
the illusion of movement’ (Heller, 2000: 3). By any standards of graphic design, the
swastika is beguilingly eloquent. Yet the unspeakable twentieth century attributes of racism
and hatred it has come to embrace confound any attempt to resurrect or rehabilitate this
most sinister of icons. By invoking the swastika, the authors are aware that they are
contributing to a discourse which sustains the symbol. But they are not nurturing it. To cite
Quinn (1994: xii), this work must not be seen ‘as part of an heroic discourse of reclamation
and salvage’. Furthermore, as in the case of Quinn’s book, the central concern is not so
much with Nazism per se as with the swastika as symbol. This paper offers a paradigmatic
account of the (mis-) use of what for the Nazis ‘became the commodity sign par excellence’
(Quinn, 1994: xii). The re-contextualisation or displacement of that sign in another world, in
another place, at another time is a profound violation of its ‘immutable symbolic space’
(Quinn, 1994: xii).
At the same time, this paper is not a rehearsal of the rationalist or fetisihistic
interpretations of the swastika. (For discussion of such treatments and detailed analysis of
the symbology of the swastika, see Heller 2000; Quinn 1994.) Rather, the paper uses the
swastika – as potent symbol it is, with worldwide distribution (Whittick, 1960: 270) – as a
heuristic for demonstrating the vital, dynamic role that context plays in the making and
instantiation of meaning within and across cultures. It is against context, where the symbol
becomes a meaning-producing agent in its own right (Quinn, 1994: 11), that the swastika is
considered in this sense; comparisons are made – to the extent that they can be – with
similar commercial exploitation of ‘de/resymbolized’ Communist ‘memorabilia’ which, by
contrast, generally attract less censure.
The paper underpins the vital role of context for Pragmatic theory and its evident
applications in the intercultural domain. The paper identifies a number of contextual
triggers and contextual drivers and we label our overall approach as Contextual Matrix
Analysis or Matrix Analysis, for short. The notion of context and these other terms are
discussed in the following section. The paper also explores the instantiation of multi-modal
meanings with passing reference to: cultural relativism, cultural scripts (after Goddard &
Wierzbicka, 2004), (visual) pragmatic acts (after Mey, 2001), historiographical discourse
(after Hobsbawm, 2002) and Halliday’s ideological principle of Failed First Try (Halliday,
2003: 222).
At a more general level, this paper suggests that the (intercultural) pragmatic agenda
can be purposefully broadened to investigate multi-modal discourse. It further suggests that
the insights gained from ‘applying’ (intercultural) pragmatics can lead to social
empowerment and informed political sensitivity. In the present instance, intercultural
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pragmatic awareness can take us beyond a more static structuralist/semiotic reading of
multimodal discourse and lead us to an understanding of how meanings are made and how
deeply they resonate in very real, societal contexts.
2. Matters of Theory, Context and Associated Terminology
Context is everything and nothing. Like a shadow, it flees from those who flee
from it, insinuating itself as the unnoticed ground upon which even the most
explicit statements depend.
(Hanks, 1996: 140)
The meaning of an image is changed according to what one sees immediately
beside it or what comes immediately after it. Such authority as it retains, is
distributed over the whole context in which it appears.
(Berger, 1972: 29)
It is frequently remarked that we live in a visual age – in the words of Gombrich (1982:
137): ‘We are bombarded with pictures from morning till night’. The Mona Lisa (in Her
multifarious guises) and King Kong, the Swastika and Cocoa-Cola are universal icons
which few would fail to recognize and to respond to. The visual communicates directly and
powerfully. How can pragmatics help us to understand the meanings of visual images or
multi-modal discourse where the visual element is salient? Traditionally, pragmatics has
been seen as a perspective on verbal communication, with its focus on language users,
language use, and contexts of use, and the dynamics of the interaction between these
interlocking elements.
This paper is an attempt to apply a pragmatic perspective beyond this more usual
concern with verbal communication. The paper proposes to extend, in a systematic way, a
pragmatic approach to the discussion of multi-modal discourse – in this instance, the
marriage of the visual (symbol as a graphic representation) with the verbal (the
accompanying discourses which prime and motivate understanding of how the symbol
comes to make meanings). Others, such as Tanaka (1994), have used a pragmatic
framework in their approach to visual texts, but are often restricted in their focus (Tanaka’s
study is based on the theory of relevance as applied to advertising texts). Furthermore,
preoccupation with structure (composition) and classification (genre) is often at the expense
of how visual images are made to mean, their intended effects, and how they are received
and responded to within the totality of contexts in which they occur and with which they
interact. In pragmatic terms, this entails assessing their illocutionary point and force,
perlocutionary effect(s) and uptake (Austin, 1962). The shifting contexts in which they
appear make viewing images – and the swastika as symbol is a visual image – such a
dynamic and complex activity. In their introduction to visual culture, Practices of Looking,
Sturken and Cartwright (2001: 25) emphasize the significance of context for experiencing
the visual:
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The capacity of images to affect us as viewers and consumers is dependent on the
larger cultural meanings they invoke and the social, political, and cultural
contexts in which they are viewed. Their meanings lie not within their image
elements alone, but are acquired when they are ‘consumed’, viewed, and
interpreted. The meanings of each image are multiple; they are created each time
it is viewed.
What appears to be central is the activity of reading images rather than passively looking at
them. Albert Manguel, in A History of Reading (1996: 27-28), argues that to look at an
object is to be active in its creation: ‘By the mere fact of looking […] we have prolonged a
memory from the beginnings of our time, preserved a thought long after the thinker has
stopped thinking, and made ourselves participants in an act of creation [our italics] that
remains open for as long as the incised images are seen, deciphered, read’. Calling to mind
Sturken and Cartwright’s (2001) observations on contextual themes, Manguel (2002: 35)
remarks in his companion volume, Reading Pictures, that: ‘If the circumstantial evidence
surrounding any act of creation is part of that act [our italics], can any reading ever be said
to be final, even if not conclusive? Can a picture ever be seen in its contextual entirety?’
To examine the swastika in its contextual entirety would involve, amongst other
things, exploring this symbol in the light of what it has meant over the millennia. We do not
read such loaded symbols with innocent eyes. As the art critic, James Elkins (1996: 591) has
argued, when we view a painting or any visual image, we infuse it with our own
experientially-driven meanings (quoted in Barnet, 2002: 21). The activity of reading the
swastika is no exception. And it can only mean in a context.
Context, rather the dynamics of context, is the underlying concept in this paper (for
fuller discussion, see Hoye, 2005). Being a contextually-driven perspective on
communication, pragmatics sees context as paramount. It is, as Mey (2001: 14) declares:
‘the quintessential pragmatic concept’. In his comprehensive introduction to the theoretical
basis of pragmatics, Verschueren (1999: 75f.) refers to Malinowski’s observations on
‘context of situation’ ‘as one of the necessary pillars of any theory of pragmatics’. Both
authors argue the case for a contextually-oriented approach to communication. This
approach we adopt and adapt in this paper. It is an approach familiar in art critic circles,
where the interdependence of meaning with context and the individual’s engagement with
the visual is often discussed in terms of reception theory (see Barnet, 2002).
Defining context is a major project in its own right. Common observations like ‘you
need to hear/read/see it in context’ or ‘it’s all a matter of context’ acknowledge the role of
context yet the term is often invoked with little explanation given of its scope and how it
applies in the very real world of our actions and perceptions. The term is used here with an
eye firmly fixed on its mediating effects (its powers of agency and its mediatory role in the
instantiation of meaning) and modulating effects (its powers to modify and its controlling
influence on meanings intended and meanings understood). Context is therefore seen as a
complex dynamic – a serial combination of forces that stimulate change within the
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communicative process. Below we outline our understanding of context and define the
related terms of recontextualisation, contextual driver and contextual trigger.
In its broadest sense, context refers to all the factors or circumstances which surround
a particular event or phenomenon – be this attending a live concert, reading a poem, viewing
a painting, recognizing a familiar logo, witnessing a trial, participating in live debate –
whatever. And these circumstances always have a direct bearing on how we understand and
respond to such events or phenomena. Something of the dynamics of context can be
captured by way of some examples. The mediating effects of context can be very potent:
contrast the cable TV broadcast of a football championship with the experience of seeing
the game live; or of listening to their CD rather than being with the ‘Three Tenors’ in
concert in the surroundings of the Stadio Braglia, Modena, Italy or in the Forbidden City,
Beijing, China. Or, to situate us in the realm of fine art and wall painting, consider the
impact of seeing Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes in the flesh, live at the Vatican,
rather than as reproductions on the living-room coffee table! And in the context of great art,
of art’s greatest icon, context itself may draw the crowds and become the focus of attention
in its own right. Recalling the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911, Leader
(2002: 3) remarks: ‘It was the empty space left by the vanished Mona Lisa that the crowds
flocked to see. It was less a case of going to see a work of art because it was there, than, on
the contrary, because it wasn’t there’!
The contextual setting can embody and trigger unique meanings and associations. The
British archaeologist Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of a young Egyptian Pharaoh,
Tutankhamen, in 1922, caused a worldwide sensation. It was possibly the most remarkable
archaeological find of the twentieth century, and it was to provide unique insights into the
mysteries and royal culture of ancient Egypt. The excavation of the tomb and subsequent
retrieval of countless objects of beauty has become the stuff of legend and the mainstay of
many an exhibition up to this day. Something of the sheer awe and excitement surrounding
the discovery is captured by Carter’s own diary entry (November 26, 1922), describing what
he witnessed when peering into the inner burial chamber of the tomb for the first time:
It was sometime before one could see, the hot air escaping caused the candle to
flicker, but as soon as one's eyes became accustomed to the glimmer of light the
interior of the chamber gradually loomed before one, with its strange and
wonderful medley of extraordinary and beautiful objects heaped upon one
another.
This is nothing less than living context! For Carter and his colleagues, the funereal objects
possessed a signature all of their own, resonant with their surroundings, with their history
and with the purpose they were originally destined to serve: to provide for the young
Pharaoh in his new life in the next world. Now removed from their cradle of origin,
portrayed as exhibits in a museum and thus divested of their funereal role, these
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‘extraordinary objects’ can now only hint at the wonder Carter and his team must have felt
at their discovery.
In this instance, the physical environment, the tomb itself, is required for the meanings
of the various objects to be fully articulated and properly understood in terms of their
originator’s intentions. The terracotta tomb warriors of Shaanxi province, north-west China
– another major archaeological discovery of the twentieth century – are a further case in
point. Here, the site of the excavation itself – an enormous mausoleum – remains an integral
part of the experience. Some 7,000 life-size figures and warriors and other artefacts have
been excavated thus far and restored in situ. As with the artefacts in Tutankhamen’s tomb,
this underground army, buried in front of the Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi’s tomb, had the
purpose of accompanying their master into the afterlife, in this case to defend him. It is as if
the context fulfils and completes the meanings embodied by these tomb sculptures.
Removal of an object from one context necessarily involves its placement in another.
We refer to this process of relocation as recontextualisation and use it in preference to the
terms displacement and decontextualisation. The former expression refers to the process of
moving something from one place or position to another; it carries with it the implication of
some atavistic throwback, that there is one true, correct, or original placement of the object
concerned. Any term with historical or ancestral connotations is inappropriate for treating
the swastika, as we argue below. Decontextualisation, the extrapositioning of an object from
the circumstances of its existence, its being as it were, is likewise considered inappropriate
because it suggests that an object can somehow be ‘objectified’, ‘sanitised’, dehistoricised,
or neutralised in terms of its surroundings.
When an object is recontextualised, new meanings are created, just as old ones are
lost. Objects, in this sense, can not exist independently of their ‘new’ context, by which they
undergo processes of contrast (with earlier context(s) if known) and transformation (as they
negotiate the ‘here and now’ of their new-fashioned existence). Admittedly, Carter’s
viewing of the objects in the setting of Tutankhamen’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings is
very different from our viewing of those ‘same’ objects transformed, in the context of the
Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Yet, context is always present: it is a constant, fluid and
dynamic force. As André Malraux (1978: 13-14) remarked, museums ‘have imposed on the
spectator a wholly new attitude towards the work of art’. Thus, whilst it was never intended
– or at least envisioned or anticipated – that the tomb sculptures and artefacts in Egypt and
China should see the light of day again, the recontextualisation that their discovery,
excavation, and relocation has brought about remains potent and imbues these same objects
with new and unfamiliar meanings. The process of recontextualisation where objects are
presented for their aesthetic enjoyment – properly called aestheticization – may involve
radical shifts in meaning. Would, for example, the representation of the Nazi swastika as an
autonomous entity, somehow render the unacceptable acceptable? (Cf. Walter Benjamin,
1936, on the aestheticization of fascism.)
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As these examples demonstrate, context plays a constitutive role: it is immanent to the
object it surrounds and accompanies. It permeates these same objects to infuse them with a
complex of meanings. (The term object here is used to refer not only to the artefacts
mentioned in the examples above but in a more general and abstract sense to refer to the
material features of any semiotic system – linguistic, visual, or musical.) Context therefore
is not some optional, tag-on, static dimension of meaning. This point is made forcefully by
Halliday, 2003: 196) in his remarks on linguistic applications of Systemic Theory:
It is a general feature of semiotic systems that they develop and function in a
context, and that meaning is a product of the relationship between the system and
its environment […].
Elsewhere, Halliday (2003: 79) writes of the constraining role of context: the choice of a
linguistic act and the meaning of the choice are determined by context. Perhaps, however,
context is more about the liberation or generation of associations than about their constraint,
and is determinative rather than deterministic. To adapt and apply this Hallidayan view to
symbol: located in, say, social context A (for instance, current Hindu art and architecture)
the use of the swastika is a function of its sacred status in Hindu iconography, which in turn
determines how it is read as a common design motif. Located in another context, say context
B (for instance, a costume party in the UK) the use of the swastika (as an integral part of a
German Afrika Korps uniform) is problematical; its evident Nazi attribution would
normally determine how it is read as the countersign of fascist politics and racist, Aryan
dogma. The (re)location of the Nazi swastika within the frivolous context of a fancy dress
party raises the fundamental issue of whether this particular symbol can be thus renamed or
desymbolised. A chief aim of this article – where the concept of recontextualisation is
central – is to explain that the contemporary discourses accompanying this unique symbol
suggest that, in its occidental, Nazi guise, the swastika has become symbolically immutable
and cannot be rewritten historically or imbued with ‘new’ meanings. At least not without
provoking heated controversy.
Context is further invoked in terms of contextual triggers and contextual drivers. A
contextual trigger is a stimulus, a causal phenomenon – verbal, visual, auditory, olfactory,
or any combination of these – that acts as a trigger and sets in train a series of powerful and
interdependent contextual drivers. The response to this initiating mechanism might be of a
collective kind. In the case of Izzue.com, we conjecture that the socio-political and
economic climate in Hong Kong in 2003, on the cusp of the SARS epidemic and its
aftermath, largely engendered specific marketing initiatives that characterised how business
was conducted by the relevant sectors of the community and how it was driven by the
commercial imperatives of the moment. Alternatively, the response might be of an
individual kind, which we have defined elsewhere as the context of psychological
disposition (Kaiser and Hoye, in preparation). This particular contextual factor is what Carl
Jung in Man and his Symbols (1964: 36) calls a psychological ‘cue’ or ‘trigger’; it may
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account for the onset of benign – or, as here, with Izzue.com – malign memories or
associations, as ‘when a sight, smell or sound recalls a circumstance in the past’. Jung
writes:
A girl, for instance, may be busy in her office, apparently in good health and
spirits. A moment later she develops a blinding headache and shows other signs
of distress. Without consciously noticing it, she has heard the foghorn of a distant
ship, and this has unconsciously reminded her of an unhappy parting with a lover
whom she has been doing her best to forget.
The contextual trigger as we define it is a conscious, motivated response rather than a
subliminal reaction. It is to do with the ‘intentional’ rather than the ‘unintentional’ contents
of the mind (Jung, 1964: 37).
The term contextual driver makes deliberate analogy to (loudspeaker) driver
technology, where the synergy between one (electro-) mechanical component and another is
a process involving the transmission of motion and power. Contextual drivers are to be seen
as dynamic forces which act upon each other and mediate the discourse they accompany.
Our working definition of this concept for this paper is as follows. A contextual driver refers
to any event or state of affairs (socio- cultural/ economic/ political in origin, etc.) which has
a direct bearing on our understanding and hence response to a given stimulus: verbal, visual,
or multi-modal. In the general context of the Izzue.com marketing campaign, a number of
contextual drivers can be identified: the nature of the Nazi swastika symbol (and as
compared with the symbols or emblems of other totalitarian regimes, such as the hammer
and sickle of the former Soviet Empire); historiographical practices and traditions in the
writing of histories on Dictatorships and Totalitarian regimes and, not least, the persistent
media focus on Hitler and the Third Reich; the Holocaust engine and discourses on
genocide and racism. Contextual drivers are fluid categories of contextual function; they
impact on each other and to some extent merge. Thus, in terms of modern history and the
twentieth century, mention of genocide is to invoke the age of totalitarian collectivism and
the historiographical discourses surrounding the mass slaughters committed by totalitarian
regimes, amongst them: the Nazi Holocaust in Europe, Stalin’s purges in Russia, the
excesses of the Mao regime in China, the atrocities of Pol Pot in Cambodia, the Armenian
massacre in the Ottoman Empire, not to mention the ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia
and the Rwandan Genocide (Rubinstein, 2004: 7-8). How one identifies contextual drivers
and enumerates them is more a matter of descriptive convenience for the outside observer
than a true and profound reflection of the myriad realities and associations that such
‘horrifying, repellent and barbaric practices’ might have had and still have for those
involved in and who survived any of these and other mass killings.
It is essential to note that these diverse contextual elements form a series, a network of
connections. In this regard, the contextual theory advanced here, which we call Matrix
Analysis, is not unrelated to Scollon and Scollon’s (2004) ethnographic study of discourse,
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known as Nexus Analysis or ‘the study of the ways in which ideas or objects are linked
together’ (2004: viii). In their system, this entails ‘the mapping of semiotic cycles of people,
discourses, places, and mediational means involved in the social actions’ that are being
studied (2004: viii). Fully endorsing the vital role of context, the authors state that ‘nothing
happens in a social and political vacuum’ (2004: viii). In contrast to Scollon and Scollon,
we do not propose an extended ethnographic theory of communication: our approach
focuses primarily on the interlacing or patterning of a wide variety of contextual cues,
specifically in relation to symbol (although this is not to deny the potential for wider
application of the theory). Contextual triggers and drivers create their own matrix or
matrices. In the case of the swastika, the constellation of contextual triggers and drivers is a
complex and formidable mix of elements. They become an inextricable part of that symbol
and are invoked whenever it is used. They and it fuse to become a highly potent visual
pragmatic act.
3. The Trigger and the Uptake: Hong Kong, Late Summer 2003
In many ways SARS could not have hit Hong Kong at a worse time. […] All of a
sudden, the hint of [economic] optimism was shattered. Passenger arrivals by air
and land collapsed and tourism dried up. Hotels were reporting lettings in the
single digits. Domestic economic activity ground to a near halt as restaurants
and shops were deserted.
(Brown, 2004: 190)
How then can artists and graphic designers communicate cross-culturally? If our
culture sets the parameters of our vision, then how can we hope to communicate
to others whose visions are colored by quite different cultural lenses? […]
Although absolute translation is rarely possible, cross-cultural interpretation of
a design or work of art is attainable. Those communicating across cultural
borders, however, must be prepared for the possible reinterpretation of their
work along somewhat different lines. As long as misinterpretation is avoided, we
should be satisfied when our work speaks back to us with a foreign accent. That
is, in fact, how we know that we have been successful; it says to us that we have
communicated meaningfully to others on their own terms.
(Guldin, 1995: vi)
We live in a world where boundaries are fluid and where things that were once
serious are all too easily made trivial.
(Hoffman, 2002: 6)
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Setting the Scene
Towards the end of June 2003, Hong Kong was removed from the WHO’s (World Health
Organization) list of SARS-affected areas. SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) had
plagued the former British colony for 100 days. It had been a 100 days of anxiety and fear.
Territory-wide hysteria was fuelled by the embattled rhetoric of local and international
media coverage (Lo, 2005: 35; Eagleton, 2004). The sinister virus was likened to the plague,
reports even recalling the great influenza outbreak following the First World War, when
over 20 million people died worldwide (Lo, 2005: 34). SARS not only wreaked havoc
amongst the population, it had a devastating (if temporary) impact on the local economy. As
multinationals pulled out their employees, as tourists stayed away in droves and as the
WHO maintained its travel advisory, Hong Kong became acutely aware that it had been
isolated, now to stand alone. As Loh and Welker (2004: 218) comment: ‘Hong Kong’s
economic lifeblood is the constant flow of people, cargo, services and capital. When people
started to avoid Hong Kong, the perception of residents was that they had been forsaken’.
To walk its streets was to witness a wasteland: walkways, restaurants, hiking trails, cinemas
and shopping malls were all but deserted.
By the time our tale of the swastika hit the front pages, the drama and economic fallout
caused by SARS had begun to subside, but the some 300 lives it had claimed and the
citywide devastation it had brought about lingered in the public conscious. How could the
general mood be captured? There was, perhaps, a collective feeling that, like the bacillus in
Camus’ The Plague, the SARS coronavirus ‘never dies or disappears for good […] and that
for the bane and the enlightening of men’ it might rise again ‘in a happy city’ (Camus, trans.
Gilbert, 1948: 252).
Perspectives
Against this setting, it is plausible to suggest that there were in fact a number of contextual
triggers at work. The need to rebound from the socio-economic ravages of SARS was a very
real community-wide imperative and not least amongst the retail bloc. In order to survive,
commercial interests needed to reach out to the general public and continually try and
persuade them to buy into a particular life style. Or, as Dyer (1982: 5) comments in
Advertising as Communication, ‘Advertising is one of the means used by manufacturing and
service industries to ensure the distribution of commodities to people in society at large and
is designed to create demands for such goods and services’. Marketing design teams operate
with their own precepts yet whatever the preferred advertising strategy happens to be, it
needs to ensure that that demand is somehow created and nurtured. At the time, Hong Kong
badly needed to rebuild it reputation as the ‘Shopping Paradise’ and to rekindle consumer
confidence, locally as well as internationally. There are local as well global strategies in
marketing and advertising which might inform the approach of the Izzue.com marketing
team.
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Enter the Players: Izzue.com
We conjecture that some time in early summer 2003, with the added imperative to restore
something of their ailing finances following the SARS epidemic, fashion retailers
throughout the territory – along with other sectors of the economy – were busy preparing for
their Fall/Winter season. At that time, the worst excesses of SARS seemed to be over, as the
siege mentality yielded to mounting optimism and the prospect of a brighter, more
prosperous future. Following Hong Kong’s removal from the WHO’s list of SARS-affected
areas, the government announced a HK $ 400 million promotion plan to lure back Mainland
and overseas tourists (Chiu and Galbraith, 2004: xxvii).
Enter http://www.izzue.com – not just a website, but a fashion chain of 14 retail
outlets, with flagship stores in the central district and other main shopping areas spread
across Hong Kong. According to its website, Izzue.com ‘suggests not only a fashion brand
for the younger generation, but also a benchmark [sic] of the latest desirable products’. How
might the marketing team promote the label and their new men’s collection? If art aspires to
the timeless, advertising has a ‘certain impatience with the world’ and leans to the
immediate effect, for ‘in advertising the span of time that gets the most attention is the short
attention span’ (Hoffman, 2002: 10). What could Izzue.com use as part of its attentiongrabbing strategy? How could Izzue.com propel their autumn collection into the
marketplace, making an immediate and striking impact on this small yet culturally diverse,
East-meets-West community, boasting several million well-healed shoppers?
In Marketing Across Cultures, Trompenaars and Woolliams (2004: 98) remark that
‘The influence of ascribed status in Chinese culture is most conspicuous in the use of
authorities and experts in marketing campaigns’. With rapid economic development on the
Mainland, this influence has become increasingly prominent. According to these authors,
status is not simply a matter of people: it is more abstract in its realisation and broader in
scope than its more usual human attribution would suggest: ‘Status is […] also ascribed to
buildings, locations, etc.’ (2004: 99). A case in point are the several colas modelled on the
American Coca-Cola brand which have ‘emerged and disappeared in China’. Could it not
also be that a symbol – with political and corporate clout – might also serve as an ‘expert’
model, albeit within the Hong Kong context? The invocation and subversion of a wellknown – even if controversial – symbol would surely fit the bill nicely, and lend itself to
restatement and reinvention in a new context.
In Cross-Cultural Design, Steiner & Haas (1995: 10) argue that ‘To qualify as a true
cross-cultural design […] it is necessary for an image to be transformed in some way; to be
appropriated and redefined. An image should be more than a quotation that gives a sense of
local color. It must take on a new significance in the context [our italics].’ One of the
categories of design technique these authors identify (1995: 28-35) is symbolism: ‘Here
objects are transformed by being placed in an unexpected context’ (1995: 28). The authors
refer to this process of transformation as ‘displacement’ – we use the term re-
11
contextualisation, for reasons argued above – by which an image from one culture comes to
represent and comment on a concept in another. The particular symbol Izzue.com have in
mind is widely acknowledged for its graphical potency. The transient nature of the
advertising enterprise would ensure that whatever was deployed would not be there for it to
fester too long in the public imagination. And there were local precedents for this brand of
advertising.
Mao Tse-tung and the Red Army had already been appropriated by an upmarket Hong
Kong competitor, Shanghai Tang, purveyors of chic and traditional Chinese clothing and
accessories, including ‘witty [sic] gift items like cufflinks featuring Chairman Mao’
(http://newyork.citysearch.com/). The many downtown antique and curio shops that
populate the Hollywood Road and local markets have long been peddling artefacts from the
Cultural Revolution – clocks, plates, busts and other communist memorabilia – where the
late Chairman Mao looms large, possibly conjuring up romantic images of the past, and of
other ‘glorious’ revolutions. In the light of these contextual imperatives, the marketing team
at Izzue.com had to be seen by their peers to be innovative, daring and provocative. They
might not have the deep corporate pockets of their competitors to produce lavish TV
commercials or glossy mailshots but they did have recourse to the kind of shock tactics that
have so frequently hallmarked the advertising campaigns of the likes of Italian clothing
franchise Benetton. Deploying controversial advertising techniques and themes (war, Aids,
racism, birth, sex, death, capital punishment) and trusting in the oft-gruesome reality of
photojournalist-type images to vividly project them, Benetton the company has become
synonymous with its ‘shockvertising’ strategy. If, to put it crudely, the basic tenet of
advertising is to grab the consumer’s attention and to keep it grabbed long enough to clinch
a sale or, minimally, to keep a company and its brand in the public purview, then Benetton
is a model exemplar.
Perhaps Izzue.com could take a leaf out of Benetton’s manual on communication
strategy? Perhaps it might draw inspiration from Benetton’s advertising philosophy? Olivero
Toscani – onetime creative director at Benetton – once described its brand of advertising as
‘a Rorschach test of what you bring to the image’ (Oliviero Toscani’s advertising
Philosophy, The Center for Interactive Advertising, www.ciadveretising.org). His take on
the use of images in advertising is characteristically apposite:
Using […] images in [an] unconventional way is an effort by Benetton to break
through the complacency that exists in our society due to the constant flow of
even the most horrendous realities communicated through conventional media
such as the evening news or the morning paper. By removing these images from
their familiar contexts and putting them in a new context they are more likely to
be noticed and given the attention they deserve as the viewer becomes involved
in the process of answering the questions: What does this image mean? Why
does this image appear with a Benetton logo? How do I feel about the subject of
the image? What can I do?
(cited in Ganesan, 2003: 6)
12
Save for a later claim by Izzue.com’s parent company IT, that its marketing strategies show
“IT has a little bit of attitude” (Simon Parry, South China Morning Post, sec. A., November
9, 2003). it is impossible to say, in the absence of hard evidence, that Benetton was their
Muse yet, given the very real contextual imperatives of the marketplace referred to above, it
is not implausible that the ‘shockvertising’ background culture this company has
engendered might also have had some bearing on Izzue.com’s decision to launch its very
own controversial advertising campaign. Highly controversial campaign, as it turns out …
The Plot: A Symbol Rides out to Public Outcry
On 9th August 2003, the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s leading English-language
daily, carried the following headlines: “Nazi-themed fashion promotion outrages shoppers”.
The article continued:
Walking into any of fashion chain http://www.izzue.com’s 14 stores is like
taking a trip back to the dark days of Nazi Germany – with swastikas and party
logos displayed on the walls and flags hanging from the ceiling.
The symbols – and references to dictator Adolf Hitler – are also emblazoned on
clothes for sale.
(Niki Law, South China Morning Post, sec. A., August 9, 2003)
Every store in the 14-group Izzue.com chain carried the spectacle of Nazi-themed lines of
clothing, including T-shirts and trousers featuring portraits of Adolf Hitler and assorted
other Nazi symbols. Fluttering ominously in regimented rows, like volk saluting at a
Nuremberg rally, red flags and banners hung unfurled from the ceilings to display their
sinister black gammadions framed by the double lightning flashes, symbols of the SS, and
the imperial eagle astride an iron cross, bearer of the Third Reich.
So complete was the panoply of Nazi regalia, that it is easy to overlook the absence of
the white disk, the habitual cradle of the Nazi swastika. It is as if Izzue.com had created a
pasticcio of Nazi symbols, a parody of the echt symbolism of the Third Reich. With what
can at best be described as a macabre desire for ‘authenticity’, one store set the visual event
to the accompaniment of Nazi propaganda films and recorded speeches, like a ham-fisted
Riefenstahlesque montage of Nazi regalia. This seemingly blatant and cynical manipulation
of the Nazi propaganda machine made for a potent cocktail of innuendo which all but
eclipsed the perpetrations of the original Nazi symbology. There is nothing ‘witty’ (cf.
comments about the design of cufflinks featuring Chairman Mao) about this concatenation
of symbols.
Of course the motivations with which we have credited the Izzue.com design team are
largely a matter of conjecture; given the remoteness of the local culture from the occidental
trappings of the ‘reinvented’ symbol, it could be argued that the designers were simply
inept. Perhaps they just lacked intercultural awareness, although this would hardly exonerate
them from being responsible for their actions! More importantly, the reporting in South
13
China Morning Post does suggest the design team were at least partly aware of what they
were doing, even if they failed to anticipate the consequences.
At one of the stores, a salesman reportedly said: ‘We always have a military theme.
We had American military uniforms last summer and we have the German one this summer’
(Niki Law, South China Morning Post, sec. A., August 9, 2003). At the time, GI uniforms
lacked the sinister connotations of their Nazi counterparts. (Some might argue today that, in
the light of the 2003 US-UK led Iraq War, and the international ruckus this has engendered,
the uniform has lost something of its ‘innocence’, if not entirely its fashion appeal.) What
was crucially different is that, now, the military trappings were not contemporary statements
but historical incarnations drawn from the Nazi era of the 1930s and 1940s. As suggested
above, the Izzue.com implementation of Nazi designs was more one of reinvention and
adaptation than one of faithful reproduction down to the last detail – to wit the absence of
the white disk; the modified design of the iron cross with the swastika superimposed in its
centre (when compared with the 1939 version). However, the designers seemed to be fully
acquainted with much of Nazi symbology: the colour themes of red, white and black; the
eagle; the iron cross; banners, and drapes. By their manipulation of the various symbols, it
was clear that the designers’ intentions were to ascribe these same symbols the status of
fashion icons, a ploy that would mesh with their marketing prerogatives. This hardly smacks
of ineptness at the level of graphic design.
The decision to use Nazi regalia led, not surprisingly, to a mighty furore, which
brought the campaign and, a little later, the sale of its associated merchandise, to an
ignominious end. Asked what was meant by the campaign, Izzue.com’s marketing manager
remarked:
This is Hong Kong, and Chinese people are not sensitive about Nazism. If you
grab 10 young people from the street and ask them if they know what Nazism is,
I bet you none of them would answer ‘yes’. People should not be too sensitive. It
is simply the creative work of a very politically ignorant and insensitive designer
[…] We’re not sure that this issue is so serious that we have the whole thing [the
sale of Nazi-themed products] pulled. It would cost millions of dollars to replace
the line. Most of the complaints are from foreigners, but our customer base is
local Chinese. Even the local [Chinese-language] papers didn’t make a big deal
out of this.
(Niki Law, South China Morning Post, sec. A., August 12, 2003)
The following week, South China Morning Post carried the editorial ‘Such crass
insensitivity threatens our reputation’ (August 17, 2003). Whilst the marketing manager’s
statement, it argued, was no justification for the use of Nazi symbols for commercial
purposes, the tenor of her comments exposed the widespread ignorance in Hong Kong of
the Nazis and their awful agenda. It were as if remoteness in time, place and culture could
somehow be used to justify belittling the relevance of the Nazi Holocaust within the Asian –
or at least Hong Kong – perspective. Ironically, perpetrators and victims alike might now be
14
seen – if they were seen at all – through the inverted lens of a rather different kind of
Otherness than that described by Edward Said (1979) in Orientalism. Now it is a case of the
Orient exercising an authority over the West and seeing itself as if mirrored by that
opposition. The enormities committed by the West in the West are now viewed more lightly
in the East than in the West. That would be a plausible cultural frame perhaps. This
perspective is analogous with anthropological and ethnographical approaches to
communication and the view that different speech communities not only have different
ways of speaking but envision the world differently, according to their own local norms and
conventions. In the present instance, it is not ways of speaking that are at issue and the
cultural scripts which frame them, rather the concern is with ‘ways of seeing’ or ‘ways of
reading’ images. Viewing use of the swastika as a momentary aberration, a trivial ineptitude
without consequence, would be a pretty extreme form of cultural relativism. Yet, as the
above editorial was to conclude, the issue was not simply a matter of Hong Kong’s
international standing: ‘Being aware of what the Nazis did therefore, is not simply to take an
interest in past events in distant lands, it is to gain insight into and understanding of [the
racist] problems that persist today’.
A Visual Pragmatic Act
Leaving aside the question of the origins and migrations of the swastika through history
(which we consider briefly in the next section), its appropriation by Izzue.com raises further
questions about the public response the designers were hoping to encourage. The short,
simple and cynical answer is that they deliberately courted controversy to gain public
attention, secure the limelight, and pack in the customers, voyeurs and consumers alike. If
that were the intent, the ploy backfired as the company was obliged to issue a public
apology through an advertisement in the South China Morning Post, as well as to withdraw
all its merchandise. It had clearly underestimated the public response.
The display of Nazi regalia was a complex set of what we call Visual Pragmatic Acts
(VPAs for short). VPAs are related to speech acts in linguistics but our use of the term is
properly analogous with Mey’s theory of Pragmatic Acts (2001) and the view that all
communication is situated activity, involving the agent and the act performed within a given
context. Referring to verbal discourse, Mey (2001: 94) writes:
The language we use, and in particular the speech acts we utter, are entirely
dependent on the context of the situation in which such acts are produced. All
speech is situated speech; a speech act is never just an ‘act of speech’, but should
be considered in the total situation of activity of which it is a part … and
therefore … it is always a pragmatic act rather than a mere speech act.
Pragmatic acts involve adaptation to the environment. To cite Mey once again, their
instantiation derives its force ‘from the situation in which they are appropriately uttered’
(2001: 219). The ‘situation’ to which Mey alludes is nothing less than the contextual
15
triggers and drivers – the contextual matrix – discussed above. Meaning derives not from
the language itself or from some predetermined match between utterance and uptake, but
through the particular synergies created when user, language and concrete circumstance
interact (cf. Mey 2001: 219-223). The relevance of pragmatic act for visual or multi-modal
discourse immediately becomes apparent. The image or symbol does not mean by itself. It
cannot be ‘desymbolised’ for its (symbolic) meaning is instantiated once it synergizes with
and is articulated within a concrete situation.
Consider, for example, Alfred Keete’s famous poster depicting Lord Kitchener, an
image which was subsequently adopted for use in a wartime recruiting poster (‘Your
country needs you’) and later adapted in many different versions. The original depicts
Kitchener, face on, head and upper torso full frame, gaze fixed on the viewer, arm, hand and
forefinger outstretched, pointing directly at the viewer. The look is at once stern, proud,
austere, commanding – in short, engaging. We might call it the Mona Lisa effect, except
that there is no ambivalence as to how the viewer is intended to understand the force of the
gaze: ‘Your country needs you’ … ‘So sign up (be a patriot/fight for King and country/show
your true mettle/or else)’. The visual act could be regarded as a prototypical directive
(Searle 1979). Ultimately, however, it can only be properly understood as such once
circumstance and intention are taken into account. There are a number of ‘ifs’ at stake here.
Some of them might be: if it is wartime, if government is actively recruiting, if the viewer
has not already been conscripted/is not already signed up, if the viewer – better, reader – is
able and willing to join up, if the image is consumed as an encouragement/instruction/
warning (rather than, say, as the advertisement for a film, a portrait of a great military man,
or as an aestheticized exhibit in the poster collection of the Imperial War Museum in
London). The explanatory power of pragmatic acts lies in its focus on the environment. To
quote Mey again: ‘The emphasis is … on characterizing a general situational prototype,
capable of being executed in the situation’ (2001: 221). Mey labels the prototype or
generalised pragmatic act as a pragmeme and its instantiation in a particular situation, as a
pract.
Reports at the time copies of the poster went up (September 1914) suggest that it did
make an active and positive impact on numbers signing up, even if it cannot be credited
with the initial surge in patriotism (cf. Imperial War Museum, London: ‘Transcription for
Kitchener Recruitment Poster’). The uptake was then, in many cases, the action of signing
up, where the poster served as a catalyst, or a spur to action that made a difference in the
world. That said, it is impossible to know what was really going on in the minds of these
eager young recruits, beyond the most general of observations about their determination to
be part of the war effort or, in some cases, to be conscientious objecters. The themes and
discourses of war are highly complex contextual matrices. In fact, little did the innocent
recruits realize, or the country at large for that matter, that, far from the widespread
expectation, war was not to be over by the Christmas of 1914 and that in early 1916, 16
16
months later, as the death toll mounted and new men were required, conscription was
introduced for the first time in British history. This postscript necessarily modifies how we
see that poster in the context of this essay, as an object in a museum, or in terms of any
other forum where it becomes situated. At every instantiation, the image becomes a unique
VPA or, to adapt Mey’s term, a visual pract (2001).
The passion to effect change in the mindsets of people – to entice, to cajole, to shock,
to awe, to persuade – whatever the motivation is for spurring them into action – is certainly
a creative urge and one that is common not just to the kind of recruitment propaganda
mentioned above. It is common to advertising in general. Peter Kropotokin’s anarchist
doctrine of ‘propaganda by the deed’ with its emphasis on decisive physical actions, such as
political assassination or acts of terrorism, is an extreme manifestation of pragmatic act but
it is not wholly removed in its rationale from the shockvertising strategies of Benetton
discussed above. Nor is it, perhaps, wholly removed from Izzue.com’s decision to thematize
Nazi regalia for commercial purposes. For many, the invocation of the Nazi swastika and its
sinister attributes is itself an act of violence, or ‘advertising by the deed’ to corrupt
Kropotokin’s injunction. Certainly, the perceived inappropriateness of re-contextualising the
swastika and thus harnessing its meanings to the prerogatives of a marketing campaign in
the Asian context, involved making a series of VPAs which caused maximum offence to
individuals and institutions. The Simon Wiesenthal Center in New York was outright in its
condemnation which it linked to not simply Jewish suffering but to racist-inspired atrocities,
wherever committed:
Apparently, some believe that the use of images of Hitler, swastikas and other
Nazi symbols connote the symbols of strength. In fact, these images should
remind the people of Asia of their own suffering at the hands of Imperial Japan,
Nazi Germany’s ally during World War II. Indeed, we owe it to the six million
victims of the Nazi Holocaust that Nazi symbols should forever invoke the
horrors of genocide, racism and anti-Semitism that Hitler and his henchmen
brought on the world.
(Simon Wiesenthal Center, New York, 11 August 2003)
The message’s didacticism was echoed in the discourse of many respondents. The responses
of the local German and Israeli Consuls are cases in point:
‘It’s totally inappropriate because these symbols of the Nazi regime stand for
cruelty and crimes against humanity’, remarked the German Vice-Consul in
Hong Kong. ‘It is unbearable to think that anyone can design a marketing
campaign that desecrates the deaths of millions of people’, echoed his Israeli
counterpart.
(Niki Law, South China Morning Post, sec. A., August 12, 2003).
The German Consul-General further observed that:
17
They [Izzue.com] used the symbols as a [public relations] gag. Those symbols are
no longer innocent. It is their mistake […] [and] they should admit to it. They
should have thought about it earlier and chosen a politically less contentious
symbol that does not relate to crimes against humanity.
For many, parading Nazi symbols was tantamount to glorifying the Japanese rape of
Nanking, itself described by one commentator as “The forgotten holocaust of World War II”
(Chang, 1997).
What is the power of this symbol? What sets it apart from, say, iconic images of Stalin
or Mao, or commercial uses of the Communist hammer and sickle, banner of the former
Soviet Union? Answering these questions involves examination of the matrix of contextual
drivers referred to earlier: the Nazi swastika in opposition to other totalitarian symbols; the
practice of writing histories on Hitler and other Dictators, coupled with the constant media
focus and attention on Hitler and The Third Reich; and the Holocaust engine and discourses
on genocide. An overview of these issues is offered in the next section.
4. The Matrix: The Swastika, the Nazis, the Reconstruction of a Symbol
Men have been encouraged to project upon their nation or the state godlike
attributes of wisdom and power they would never claim in their right minds for
themselves as identifiable individuals. Symbols like Fatherland, King, Il Duce,
the Old Flag, serve to unite in compulsive automatic behaviour people who
might, in relation to the everyday realities of the common life, exercise rational
judgment and good sense.
(Mumford, 1938: 359)
We have suggested that a unique confluence of contextual triggers – the ravages of SARS;
the attendant economic downturn in Hong Kong; robust (and often exaggerated)
international media coverage of the scourge; the general siege mentality, territory-wide; the
perceived need for radical marketing initiatives; trends and styles in global and local
(glocal) marketing and advertising strategies – drove Izzue.com to create a series of Visual
Pragmatic Acts, namely the incarnation of Nazi symbols for commercial ends, as part of
their Hong Kong marketing campaign. These visual acts elicited a variety of (mostly
hostile) responses from the local Chinese and expatriate and international communities. It is
argued that these responses can be accounted for in terms of a number of contextual drivers:
the nature of the swastika symbol itself; the public discourse on genocide and Holocaust;
historiographical practice; media focus on and preoccupation with Nazism and the Third
Reich.
18
Tracing the Swastika: The Swastika as Symbol
The design, as a new identity, acts as a catalyst. It makes an organization focus
on what it does, who it is, and where it’s going.
(Steiner and Haas, 1995: 144)
It was the strength of fascism in general that it [the swastika] realized, as other
political movement and parties did not, that with the nineteenth century Europe
had entered a visual age, the age of political symbols, such as the national flag
or the national anthem – which, as instruments of mass politics in the end proved
more effective than any didactic speeches.
(Mosse 1999, cited in Heller, 2000: 60)
Whilst contextually significant, the discourses surrounding the swastika – tracing its origins
and history, its functions, and the myths and cults of swastika lore – are dealt with
comprehensively elsewhere (cf. Heller, 2000; Quinn, 1994; Wilson, 1894) and thus attract
only very brief commentary here. Described in a major nineteenth century monograph
(Wilson, 1894: 763) – thus predating its adoption and adaptation by the German Nazi Party
– as ‘the earliest known symbol’, the swastika has a rich socio-cultural and contextual base
and one which is uniquely disparate in its origins and global reach. Its iconographic
diversity is comprehensively recorded in Wilson (1894) in terms of: ‘geographic dispersion’
– it surfaces throughout the Far East, the Near East, Africa, Ancient Greece, the
Mediterranean, and Asia – and ‘the migration of symbols’ – where the aetiology of the
swastika is seen as a process of migration and reconstruction, rather than as one of
‘independent invention’ (Wilson, 1894: 983). Although its origin(s) and early history seem
forever ‘lost in antiquity’ (Wilson, 1894: 948), there are, as Heller (2000: 28) records ‘an
extraordinary number of extant examples from all periods and from all parts of the globe’.
In its many nineteenth and early twentieth century guises, and prior to its Nazification, the
symbol was regularly deployed as an inoffensive design logo with religious, decorative, and
commercial applications, carrying with it positive connotations of ‘well-being’ and ‘good
fortune’. The swastika had many such benign uses. Rudyard Kipling adopted the swastika
as his personal logo; likewise the Staatliches Bauhaus, the Swedish company Allmänna
Svenska Elektriska Aktiebolaget, and the Danish brewing giant Carlsberg; Coca-Cola
issued a swastika pendant and it also embellished many a household and leisure artefact (see
Heller, 2000: 81-105). The symbol has played – and continues to play – an important
symbolic role in many world religions such as: Hinduism; Buddhism; Jainism; and to a
lesser extent in Abrahamic religions. It is found in Chinese and Japanese cultures (temples
and shrines on Japanese maps are regularly indicated by a little swastika, with the ‘hooks’
sometimes turning right, sometimes left); until just after the outbreak of World War II, it
was used by Native American tribes; it is also evidenced in many pre-Christian European
traditions.
Heller (2000: 41) suggests that the arms of the swastika ‘could very well symbolize
folklore, mythology, occultism, and ideology, for these underscored its significance during
19
the early twentieth century’. The symbol underwent a series of metamorphoses before being
adopted by the Nazis, the chief grounds for which were its dubious Aryan credentials as the
countersign of a Nordic master race and, from the design viewpoint, its graphic directness
and simplicity. Overtones of racial purity, purging and supremacy abound and its antiSemitic message made explicit by Hitler himself, in this extract about the new Nazi flag
from his autobiography, Mein Kampf (1925-1926): ‘In red we see the social idea of the
movement, in white the nationalistic idea, in the swastika the mission of the struggle for the
victory of Aryan man and, by the same token, the victory of the idea of creative work,
which as such always has been and always will be anti-Semitic’. Furthermore, as Whittick
(1960: 272) records, in his speeches, Hitler would refer ‘to the swastika as that symbol of
resurrection, of the revival of national life’ thus emphasizing the symbol’s association with
its traditional values of regeneration and renewal. It should be noted that the swastika did
not appear cold, but customarily in the middle of a white disk, this in turn set against a red
background.
Yet, as Heller (2000: 60) argues, the precise manner of the symbol’s adoption ‘has
been veiled by the mythology created by and for Adolf Hitler in an attempt to purge any
outside influence from his past’. In the end, the usurpation of the swastika or, as it is called,
the Hakenkreuz, by the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP, lasted for
only a short span in the symbol’s several-thousand-year history, that is from its official
adoption by the Nazis in 1920 until 1946, when it was constitutionally banned – and
remains banned – from any public display in Germany. Whilst not prohibited by law
elsewhere, and leaving aside the claims of revisionists, rehabilitators, and fetishists, there is
widespread aversion to its re-use or reinvention today, for whatever purpose, regardless of
its pre-Nazi past and how once it travelled the world as a symbol of luck and good fortune.
Hitler, as professed author of the Nazi swastika, took full credit for its compelling
design and newly-fashioned purpose. His was a very personal as well as professional
obsession with its reinvention and freshly minted propagandist role. The swastika enjoyed
pivotal status in the context of Nazi propaganda and pageantry. Its complete and creative
dissemination and deployment, chiefly through the expert offices of Dr. Josef Goebbels,
Reich Minister of Propaganda, and Albert Speer, ‘Hitler’s Architect’, ensured the symbol its
unique place and potency in the articulation of Nazi identity and ideology:
Even the most vociferous opponents of Nazism agree that Hitler’s ‘identity
system’ is the most ingeniously consistent graphic program ever devised. That he
succeeded in transmuting an ancient symbol that had such a long-lasting
historical significance into one even more indelible – and in such a comparatively
short span of time – is attributable to his complete mastery of the design and
propaganda processes.
(Heller, 2000: 69)
Hitler and swastika are as one and their association a unique symbiosis in the annals of
totalitarian symbology. The full measure of the symbol, which was to take on a life of its
20
own, is vividly captured in Leni Riefenstahl’s pioneering masterpiece of political
propaganda: Triumph des Willens, Triumph of the Will (1935), a documentary – rather
glorification – of Hitler and his symbol, made during the 1934 Nazi party congress in
Nuremberg. Hitler, symbol, Fatherland are inseparable and interchangeable. A minute after
the film opens to a Wagnerian theme, the Nazi eagle fades in slowly, relieving the otherwise
dark screen. Nearly two hours later, as the film closes to the final strains of Horst Wessel
Lied, the national anthem of the Nazi party, a huge swastika is superimposed on the screen,
in the final sequence, before the scene fades, once again to black. In his closing speech at
the rally, Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, fiercely proclaims: ‘The Party is Hitler! Hitler is
Germany just as Germany is Hitler! Hitler!’ As Quinn (1994: 64) observes: ‘When Hitler is
absent in Riefenstahl’s film, his place is taken by the swastika, which, like the image of the
Führer, becomes a switching station for personal and national identities’. Who was Hitler;
with what did the swastika cohere? The British historian, J. M. Roberts (1999: 402), sums
up the man in this way:
No simple formula … contains Hitler or his aims. He expressed Germany’s
resentments and exasperations in their most negative and destructive forms and
embodied them to a monstrous degree. Obsessed and haunted as he was by the
fanatical animosities shaped in his youth, he was given scope by economic
disaster, political cynicism and a favourable arrangement of international forces
to release these negative qualities at the expense of all Europeans, Germans
included. In doing so, he felt no internal restraints and the oputcome was a
barbaric regime and international disaster.
No matter, then, the histories of the swastika with their tales of goodness and well-being: to
read the Nazi swastika is to bear witness to the hideous acts and atrocities enacted by the
Nazi regime. To deploy the swastika, for whatever ends, is to prostitute, is to extol these
appalling associations. For symbol is a broad term which in everyday use refers, as Whittick
(1960: 3) remarks, to ‘all [our italics] that is meant by a sign, mark or token’. A symbol is
thus understood to stand for something else, to trigger an immediate, powerful and enduring
association with what it represents. There is a demonstrable symbolic association between
the swastika and its use in the occidental context of Nazi rhetoric, with its racist imperative.
The sheer horror of the Nazi atrocities and the immorality of their agenda have impacted on
the symbol well beyond its use in the World War II arena, as emblem of hatred, racism and
annihilation. The symbol has thereby been appropriated from its other, wider world contexts
and divested of all and any of its hitherto positive connotations. Asian commentators and
others might well condemn its occidental (mis-) use and apologists argue for the
rehabilitation of its more primitive contexts of use. But arguments for the symbol’s
restoration or reclamation are naïve at best. They ignore, at their peril, the potency of the
Nazi message and its appeal in quarters where racist dogma looms large. The powerful
symbolism of the swastika makes it a rallying cry for neo-Nazis and other hate groups. For
as long as the swastika is equated with Hitler and Nazism, its symbolic status will be
21
determined by the force of that unique and terrible association. It is for this reason that we
have argued in the introduction that the swastika needs to be read ‘against’ context, where
the symbol can be seen to act as a meaning-producing agent in its own right. ‘Without
context’, says Quinn 1994: 11), ‘analysis can become a set of prejudices and opinions’. A
reading of the swastika as a ‘symbol in context’ – here, its contemporary use as a marketing
tool – reveals the inappropriateness of a marketing strategy which implicitly seeks to divest
such a powerful symbol of its associations or somehow to mask their true import. Citing
Hodder (1982: 213), Quinn (1994: 11) draws attention to how a contemporary reading of
the swastika must inevitably takes these associations into account:
While the distant origin of a particular trait may be of little significance in a
present context, the more immediate history is relevant. The total history of
swastikas is less relevant to the present meaning of this sign than its more recent
associations [our italics]. In general, the choice of a symbol as part of a present
strategy must be affected by at least its immediately previous use.
The swastika remains tainted. Its deployment, regardless of intention or purpose, is to
expose and to exploit the symbol’s Nazi attributions. The role of the symbol in the history
of design and socio-political persuasion is unique. No other symbol in the history of the
twentieth century enjoys the swastika’s status nor is there one so stigmatised. Compare the
communist hammer and sickle, dual symbols connoting the alliance of the industrial worker
and the peasant, and a banner in whose name many an innocent life was plundered. As
consumers of symbols we do not always rationalise their use. The hammer and sickle takes
on almost Romantic associations with youth and the heady 1960s, an instance of
revolutionary chic, with an impact and appeal not unlike that of the mythical, larger-thanlife figure of Che Guevara. It is redolent with humankind’s aspirations to better its lot. But
can the hammer and sickle and the swastika be compared? Symbols they may be, but is this
really comparing like with like? Nazism never could be and never was a noble aspiration.
How could it be with its agenda of racial purging and assertion of racial supremacy? In his
autobiography, the British social historian Eric Hobsbawm (2003: 130) writes disarmingly
of his alignment with the left which, as he acknowledges, was a far greater attraction for
intellectuals than the right, in the first part of the twentieth century. He cites the Belgian
academic, Pierre Ryckmans, who offers a poignant contrast between leftist versus rightist
allegiances: ‘All of us in the intellectual world know people who have been communists
who have changed their minds. How many of us have come across ex-Fascists?’
Communism had/has its ideals. Michael Halliday (2003, 222) cites communism as the
‘textbook illustration’ of what he calls an FFT (Failed First Try), and the tenor of his
commentary hints, perhaps, at the very idealism and humanity of which Nazism is so totally
devoid:
22
Here [in communism] people tried for the first time to design history on a
theoretical foundation; and we all know the result – the kind of peasant-dynastic
state capitalism that went under the name of communism was a prototypical
instance of FFT. No doubt we will have to wait at least a generation before the
next attempt, which will not be called communism but something completely
different, with a name perhaps taken from Tamil or Yoruba and certainly not
‘post-‘ anything.
Izzue’s pragmatic act of invitation to enter its world of military-themed fashion became
confounded with the symbol’s equation with evil. A status and powerful set of associations
man has chosen to give the symbol cannot simply be altered through the willfulness of an
ill-wrought marketing campaign.
Writing History: Hitler and Dictators of the Twentieth Century
The numbers of people murdered by Stalin’s tyranny far surpass those killed in
the Nazi camps. The numbers of Mao’s victims are yet greater, Pol Pot killed a
far higher proportion of the population than Hitler did. Yet, even after thinking
about Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, to turn towards Hitler still seems to be to look
into the deepest darkness of all. If we hope for a humane world, Nazism is what
Nietzsche might have called our antipodes.
(Glover, 1999: 317)
In his controversial anatomy and indictment of the Nazi Holocaust, Finkelstein (2003: 143)
records the fascination Nazism and its crimes holds for scholars: ‘The number of scholarly
studies devoted to the Nazi Final Solution is conservatively estimated at over 10,000’. No
doubt the unrelenting flow of scholarship has gained impetus from hitherto inaccessible
documents recently drawn from Russian archives and, of course, sources that originated in
the former German Democratic Republic. Scarcely a month goes by without there being
some major new publication on Hitler and the Third Reich. At the time of writing, the
second part of Evans’ major trilogy has just been published: The Third Reich in Power
(2005), a major undertaking which follows hotly on the heels of Kershaw’s monumental
two-volume study: Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris (1999) and Hitler: 1936-1945: Nemesis
(2001), a work which some argue has supplanted Bullock’s classic Hitler: A Study in
Tyranny (1991). The dictatorhips of Hitler and Stalin are the focus of Overy’s new study,
The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia (2004), a work which will no doubt
supersede Bullock’s masterful Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (1992). Asserting the
historian’s role, Overy warns:
The historian’s responsibility is not to prove which of the two men was the more
evil or deranged, but to try to understand the differing historical processes and
states of mind that led both these dictatorships to murder on such a colossal scale.
(2004: xxxiii)
23
The list of scholarly studies is an extensive one and the flow shows no signs of abating. An
(admittedly) crude Google search on the internet shows some twenty-one and a half million
hits for ‘Adolf Hitler’; just under fifteen million for ‘Mao’; around ten million for Stalin,
and then Pol Pot who lags well behind this trio, with a score well under two million. A
recent work on Mao, Chang and Halliday’s Mao: The Unknown Story (2005: 509) contrasts
his ‘vision’ with those of his peers, Hitler and Stalin:
What Mao had in mind was a completely arid society, devoid of civilisation,
deprived of representation of human feelings, inhabited by a herd with no
sensibility, which would automatically obey his orders. He wanted the nation to
be brain-dead in order to carry out his big purge – and to live in this state
permanently. In this he was more extreme than Hitler or Stalin, as Hitler allowed
apolitical entertainment, and Stalin preserved the classics.
The relevance of historiographical practices for this enquiry is that they inevitably sustain
awareness of the Nazi engine and its attendant symbology, through either explicit or
exclusive focus or comparison with other totalitarian figures and regimes. The more
controversial the reference, the more likely it is to act as a potent contextual driving force.
Consider the public furore which surrounded the Irving-Lipstadt libel case (2000), in which
British historian, David Irving accused Lipstadt of libel for accusing him of being a
Holocaust denier. Called as an expert witness in the case, which found in favour of the
defendants, Lipstadt and Penguin Publishing, Evans (2002) went on to publish Lying About
Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial, which documented the muchpublicised trial. It is significant that the work has not yet found a UK publisher, on account
of the threat by Irving that he would file a fresh libel suit. No comparable controversy seems
to surround the writing of history about Stalin or Mao, although it is claimed by some
scholars that the Chang and Halliday Mao biography (2005) overstates the case against him
(cf. Nora Tong, South China Morning Post, sec. E., December 10, 2005).
Scholarly studies are not alone, of course, in providing such focus and orientation. The
media, especially television, are broadly preoccupied with Hitler-related themes. In the UK,
BBC2 has just finished broadcasting a six-part documentary Auschwitz: The Nazis and the
“Final Solution”. It also ran a programme Inside the Mind of Adolf Hitler – Timewatch, the
final episode in a four-part series, exploring the theme of Germany at war. This is not to
mention the many other programmes with their focus on World War II. Finkelstein (2003:
143) comments on the situation in America where ‘Hardly a week passes without a major
Holocaust-related story in the New York Times’.
In short, the Izzue.com Nazi-themed marketing campaign launched a series of potent
contextual drivers which inevitably invoke the historiographical discourses and media
practices we have outlined above and which necessarily reflect the public interest that such
controversial abuse arouses.
24
Reading the Holocaust: Reading the Symbol
That anyone in his senses would argue that the Holocaust did not occur, despite
the simply overwhelming and irrefutable evidence that it did, is a sign of just how
deeply the Holocaust has entered into the consciousness of the West.
(Rubinstein, 2004: 173)
It is a truth universally acknowledged that some wrongful acts are more
wrongful than others.
(Lang, 2005: 52)
The literature on genocide in history and the Nazi Holocaust in particular is vast.
Controversies surrounding how the Nazi ‘Final Solution’ and the extermination of some six
million Jews, is to be understood or deconstructed abound. As Lang (2005: ix) reports:
‘Representations of the Holocaust have at times been moved by extraneous social or
political or religious purposes in ways that skew or distort that event’s historical and moral
boundaries’. Again – and the purpose here is not to review the literature nor to rehearse
familiar or not-so-familiar Holocaust controversies – but to stress the significance of this
body of scholarship for the present discussion. That said, it must surely be acknowledged
that, to cite Rubinstein (2004: 306): ‘The experience of the Jewish Holocaust changed
everything and, it is likely, will for ever determine and delimit all discussion of genocide
and all attempts to define and penalise the crime’.
It was not until the late 1940s that the concept of genocide entered the Western
consciousness. The atrocities that marked the end of that century reawakened the discourses
on the Holocaust ‘now’, according to Rubinstein (2004: 309), ‘universally internalised as
the essence of evil’. Without minimising those later crimes – not to mention those that
preceded the “Final Solution” – the Holocaust was in a sense unique. Mao, who Chang and
Halliday (2005: 3) note ‘was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more
than any other twentieth-century leader’ terrorised his own population. Likewise Stalin,
persecuted ‘only’ his own people, overseeing the deaths of some 50 million Russians.
Hitler’s tally may be much smaller – some six million Jews (not to mention other identified
groups) were exterminated – but the extermination was exported well beyond the frontiers
of the German Republic. The ideological gulf between Stalin and Hitler, Overy (2004: 632633) explains, was immense. Whereas Stalin ‘wanted the Soviet people to construct a
socialist future’ where they would enjoy equality and happiness, Hitler ‘was bent on
creating the empire of the master race’, to be constructed from the ‘carnage of war’. The
Nazis pursued a deliberate policy of genocide, ‘the creation of a continent-wide killing
machine and the single-minded pursuit of extermination as policy’ (Rubinstein, 2004: 312).
It is precisely this machine that the swastika has come to represent and to embody.
25
Conclusion
The underlying concern of this paper has been to demonstrate the validity and explanatory
power of using a contextual approach in the discussion of a symbol whose incarnation
renders it coherent it with a range of interlocking and powerful discourses – the contextual
triggers and contextual drivers we have identified in our analysis. A certain amount of our
argumentation has involved conjecture: how could one possibly know if the Izzue.com
design team did purposefully adopt the shockvertising technique used by the likes of
Benetton? What is known, however, and what we have taken pains to explain, are the
discourse practices and controversies which surround the swastika and come into force once
that symbol is invoked. Of course, in the end, symbols do not mean by themselves; they are
made to mean by those who design, adopt, and use them. The Nazis appropriated and made
the swastika their own. As Quinn (1994: 138) concludes: ‘The Nazi swastika is a monument
both to the immoral and violent actions which accompany racist thought and also to the
corruption of meaning in an act of collective self-representation’. If, as Thomas Carlyle
(1831) once observed ‘It is in and through symbols that man, consciously or unconsciously,
lives, works and has his being’, there can be no place for the reincarnation of this beguiling
yet ultimately appalling symbol.
26
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