ABSTRACT
A visit to the Nuremberg Zeppelin field as it exists today supplies evidence of a healthy disrespect for the few remaining monuments of National Socialist architecture. On Sundays, Turkish Gastarbeiter and their families picnic in the shade of trees flanking Hitler’s ‘Great Road’, the grand thoroughfare which was intended to link the ancient Nuremberg, the ‘City of Imperial Diets’ with his modern ‘City of the Rallies’. Tennis is played against the walls of the Zeppelin tribune, and teenagers tryst on the steps. However, this reclaiming of Nazi architecture for leisure activity is frustrated by the neo-Nazi swastika graffiti which must constantly be removed from the tribune towers and entranceways. This is also the case at the Olympic stadium in Berlin, where the bronze swastikas which have been partially erased from the ceremonial bell reappear in graffiti on the lavatory walls, contesting with the countering phrase ‘Nazi raus’ (Plate 18). Nazi architecture can be rehabilitated and used for other purposes; the Nazi swastika cannot, and it remains in neo-Nazi iconography as a portable monument to the regime. And as I mentioned in my introduction, both the racist sign of the swastika and the perimeter of the concentration camps define spaces which cannot be reappropriated and reused. The Nazi swastika was the visual perimeter, the linked chain of imagery, with which Hitler sought to encircle first Germany, then the whole of Europe. Yet this mnemonic of power concealed a different loading of memories and desires that had become attached to the swastika when it was chosen as the DAP (Deutsches Arbeiter Partei) emblem in
1919. The following sec tion traces the genealogy of those desires which were obliterated in the totalitarian form of the swastika, first as they were represented in the debates of National Socialist ideology, and then in a more general sense through a philosophy of ornament in the modern era.
