JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

I know this shouldn’t be so semi-surprising and yet so not-unexpected, but it is–finding NSDAP/Nazi symbolism in Germany in the ’30’s embedded in and “edifying” common items and ordinary locations.  The thing would just appear, like a little stamp of approval, in advertisements for toothpaste, cars, pins, engines, oil–multiple alphabets of everyday bits made to associate with NSDAP emblems.  In this instance the found-swastika  caught my eye in a design detail for a gate. The company, Remanit (in Krefeld, northwest of Dusseldorf), specialized in indoor and outdoor stainless steel fixtures–handrails, lighting elements, doors, gates, so on. The gate in the ad–appearing in an oversized magazine on art and taste, Die Kunst, Monatschefte fuer Freie und Angewandte Kunst, volume 74, 1934/5—contained a decoration of a family crest-like design, incorporating a cross; on the other gate, another crest, and almost lost in the shadow was a large swastika.  Party members and sympathizers and other passives used the symbol (in its many iterations) quite a bit,adorning their possessions and products with it– and evidently also in one’s stainless steel impervious-to-rusting-but-not bombing gate crest, a stamp of approval for the eclipse of a culture and nearly unprecedented destruction. 

And the detail: