Word: swastika
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Grass' novel is a perrennial best-seller in Germany, a volume of modern myths that has almost Biblical significance for those that lived through The War and knew Nazi Germany; and for the younger generation, for whom the swastika and the "heil" are the lost trapping of a confusing, all too-recent past. Even Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's seven-hour nightmare, Our Hitler, with its pounding Wagner and Beethoven, acknowledges Oskar's drum. It beats in time to the modern German effort to recreate Hegel's sense of history, Goethe's sense of self, Nietzche's sense of strength...
SYBERBERG'S VISIONS of the Hitler phenomenon are tied together from part to part by the wanderings of Amelie Syberberg--the director's child--through the mise-en-scene. Cuddling a stuffed dog with swastika tags, hurrying from corpse to corpse, the rubble of the bombed Reichstag. She begins and ends each part of Our Hitler, and she leads us to Hitler's last stand, where the ventriloquist approaches his Hitler dummy and puts him on trial. "You are to blame for the successful imperialism of Moscow, Adolph Hitler. You are to blame for the eternal Jew, wandering, for homes...
...Amsokeag-Bridge-Manchester exit, past the big Holiday Inn ("Welcome Gv Reagan Wife"), and on the right the billboard squats in a weedy lot. "Make the Dollar Sound as Gold--Vote LaRouche." And on the blue-tinted forehead of this Democrat, in red spray paint, someone has scrawled a swastika...
What does a swastika mean? During World War II, it meant the mechanical annihilation of an entire race of human beings--an act motivated by the highest form of vanity. But on the t-shirt of Sid Vicious, who knows what it means? It is shocking, stomach-twisting, and if nothing else, it is some kind of self-glorification that Vicious and his followers need...the self-glorification he saw in old war documentaries when he was in grammar school, ripping out toilet seats during recess...
...woman who thinks that orgasm is the highest state of consciousness, who roots her angst in Burroughs, Rimbaud, Hendrix, Morrison, the Bible--symbolists all. Patti Smith has used the symbols of our time exceedingly well, just as Dylan and Springsteen did before her, towards somewhat different ends. Avoiding the swastika, she has flaunted her hair, her leather, her boots, her sickliness, her chains, her sex...powerful symbols which horrified Rotarians and changed rock'n'roll...