The Ministry of Fear

Steven Heller The Ministry of Fear W H EN I WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD A FRIEND GAVE ME A NAZI FLAG THAT his father had brought back from the war as a souvenir. Despite my parents’ warnings not to upset my grandmother, whose father, mother, and younger sisters (I later learned) perished at Auschwitz, I would often streak through the apartment in her presence, wearing the flag as a kind of superman cape. At the time, I knew nothing about the Holocaust. I was also addicted to watching World War II movies on TV and, as a wannabe comic artist, drew more pictures of Nazis than Americans because their uniforms were better. The black SS uniform with the silver “Death’s Head” on the hat and red, black, and white swastika armband made the entire costume so fearsome. Sadly, I had no idea how deeply the Nazi flag, emblems, and those uniforms frightened my grandmother because she never said a word. AS A GRAPHIC DESIGNER I AM FASCINATED BY HOW GRAPHICS ARE USED to intimidate and instill fear as a tool of politics and ideology. It is in this sense that I have observed the unmitigated power of the swastika and all things Nazi. I must admit, as aJew I am embarrassed by my fasci­ nation. And this paradox is one reason why I wrote a book called The Swastika: A Symbol Beyond Redemption?, which examines the power of the symbol to continually elicit fear. I still own that Nazi flag and have subsequently amassed a collec­ tion of over 100 additional swastika artifacts of Nazi, neo-Nazi, as well as non-Nazi origin. These things are horrifically hypnotic. Yet how Adolf Hitler created an aesthetic and ethos that millions of people willingly followed is, for me, a continual source of bewilder­ social research Vol 71 : No 4 : W inter 200 4 849 ment. The swastika was his instrument—his personal emblem—the surrogate of the man. Arguably, like any symbol it is only as good or bad as the ideas it represents. After all it had been an ancient symbol of good fortune, among other things, and remains a charged religious icon in many parts of the world. But as the icon of Nazism the swastika was transformed from a neutral vessel into an instrument of criminal­ ity. A case can be made that the swastika is not the bottle in which an evil genie lived; it is the incarnation of that creature. MY GRANDMOTHER EMIGRATED FROM GALACIA IN THE EARLY TEENS. her father deposited her and a couple of siblings in New York while he returned to collect the rest of his family. The Great War prevented his own emigration and after it was over he was forced to remain in Poland with his ill wife and younger children. The only time my grandmother ever spoke about the Holocaust was when I was 13 and she showed me a postcard from her father that was dated 1940. She received it a few years after the war. It had actually been posted from the Lodz ghetto and was stamped with three official Nazi seals that included the swastika. The postcard had an acrid smell, as though it had been at the bottom of a moldy bag for years. The words said that everything was fine. But the swastikas said otherwise. In 1946 my grandmother learned of their fate. I always remember that smell when I see a swastika. Of course, not everyone who lived under the Nazi symbol was afraid of its powers. To the contrary, millions were emboldened by it. This ancient mark signified the good fortune of the German people to have a leader who rekindled their collective greatness. Yet in order to do so he instilled in the majority fear of his minority enemies through regular propaganda blitzes. One such was weapon of hate was Der Sturmer (The Stormer), the rabid, anti-Semitic weekly newspaper edited by the infamous “Jew-baiter” and executed Nuremberg war criminal, Julius Streicher. Nothing could have prepared me for the indescribable sense of defile­ ment that I experienced when I held a copy in my hands and read (or rather was...