JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 670 Blog Bookstore
[An associated post on the long lives of liberated Nazi concentration camp doctors can be seen HERE.]
Do you have movable Nazi-designed art in the streets of your
town? I do! And probably so do you.
It was a cloudless, perfect day in my mountain city when I
first noticed the 10-foot tall Nazi-designed art tooling down the street on three sides
of the beer truck. I‘d seen the design
many times, but it wasn’t until I was stuck in traffic behind the truck that I
noticed the artist’s stylized signature beside the logo. The light changed, and I watched it—while I
was stalled and stopped by recognition—make its way into the world, merrily
selling its product, Franziskaner Beer.
You’ve seen the truck—a smiling Franciscan monk nestled in a
green oval, holding a liter-like mug of his product, content in his
experience. The artist, Ludwig Hohlwein*,
is listed in many places as a “graphic design from Munich”,
and the “prince of posters”, and was an enormously gifted artist—he was also
the leading designer of Nazi propaganda posters from 1933 to 1945.
I wondered how this could be, how a corporate logo and
identity designed by a Nazi –in 1935--could still be in use? In a series of emails with the parent company
of Franziskaner, Spaten, N.A. (which was
actually Spaten-Lowenbrau, which was in turn purchased by InterBev), I never really
did get my answer. Spaten N.A. (a
personal name was never used in the correspondence) went from an semi-apologetic
attitude of not knowing who or what the artist was, to a highly defensive
posture , somehow huddling down with the American bombing of Dresden and Tokyo
in a questionable semi-logic justifying their use of Hohlwein. The result was not surprising, but the means
and the arguments certainly were—I am aware of course that Spaten has invested
untold millions in establishing their iconic image; but, at the end of the day,
their artist is still a Nazi, and a bad one at that. 
Why is this so bothersome?
The history of firms doing business with the Nazis during the war and
former Nazi concerns successfully surviving the war (in one form or another)
that continued to do business is a long, complex story. My guess is that if all of these companies were to magically disappear in a pretty gedankenexperiment that there would be huge gaping holes in our economic landscape. Do we think of Auschwitz when we seek headache relief? Probably
not, though the maker of zyklon-b and
one of the principle reasons for Auschwitz, the enormous
and powerful conglomerate firm of I.G. Farben, escaped the war’s end by being broken into
companies such as BASF, Bayer and Hoescht (much to the dismay of people like General Patton, who thought that dismantling the company was supposed to actually dismember it, not rationally cleave it into its constituent and self-sustaining elements. Also the folks who went to prison for their war crimes at I.G were all pretty much back and in the boardroom(s) within a few years.)
Or for that matter do we think of
gas chambers when filling up at Exxon?
Exxon had been Standard Oil (New Jersey),
which shipped fuel to the Nazis during the war and was one of the largest
stockholders in Farben, and happily made money with the Nazis during the course
of the war.
There are just a few examples of many,
many cases of, what, what do we call it? Business? That's what Prescott Bush must've called it. One of his wartime activities was being responsible for the UBC (Union Banking Corporation) which was involved with laundering/banking Nazi funds (including some big numbers for Fritz Thyssen of Thyssen steel, monolithic-backer of Hitler in the '20's and '30's). There was nothing necessarily illegal with that until it became illegal--UBC and the pater familias of the Bush dynasty continued their practices into mid-1942, when the federal government caught up with them and slammed UBC and Brown Brothers Harriman under the Trading with the Enemy Act, as they were in fact helping out the Nazi cause.
It seems that in a world
of questionable origins of popular goods it might seem best to have little
sense of history and a forgetful one at
that.
Is this Nazi-drawn art any less repellent, say, than seeing
R.E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in stained glass at the National Cathedral, or
driving down the Jefferson Davis Highway in Virginia, or cheering for the
unredeemably-named Washington DC National Football League team? Mitsubishi and BMW made aircraft that
supported heinous regimes and shot down American men; on the other hand, the
isolationist publisher and proselytizer of the brazenly stupid Protocols of the Elders of Zion
and trader with Nazis, Henry Ford, still makes a good truck. I have two of them. (GM was there too.) Monsanto produced Agent Orange which defoliated large swaths of Vietnam while filling up American soldiers with dioxins; Dow Chemical produced napalm for effective and horrible use in the same war--does this matter when we buy the food produced by their chemical additives?
It is a potentially endless list of supposedly benign
betrayals—a surface scratched revealing a torturous and bloody past. But in an age where (as it says on the
National Archives) it is not longer true that “the past is prologue”, the past
is not even the past, so, I guess, we get a fresh start whenever we need
one. It’s like a convenient memory
lapse, like berating President Hugo Chavez while filling up at the Citgo stations selling
his oil. (Citgo is also a NASCAR sponsor)
Maybe in some minds the Spaten folks were right after
all—transgressions are excusable in the face of the transgressions of the
accuser, which would be a free pass to moral leniency. The United
States did firebomb Dresden and Tokyo, and we consume all
manner of food an energy beyond the rest of the world while billions of people
suffer invisibly (to us). The weight of
this history can bring you quickly to silence.
Perhaps it is just exhaustion that lets us necessarily forget these
unpleasant pasts—perhaps with their memory nothing would get done.
On the other hand, well, there goes that truck and the happy
Monk. I'm not so sure why it bothers me so endlessly--perhaps it is the utterly trivial nature of it all, something that could've been so easily rectified as folks were dusting themselves off in May 1945. Why not just get rid of that image and replace it by something similar (or whatever) that was executed by a Not-a-Bad-Nazi and start afresh? But it looks like Spaten NA is content with their artist--he might be a Nazi, but he's their Nazi, and it is a conceit and a contentment to let sleeping Nazis lie.
Volkswagen certainly does. The "VW" logo was designed by Nikolai Borg under the direction of "Nazi designer" Fritz Todt (!)--Borg is still alive and is currently suing to be officially recognized as it designer. The cog part of the wheel surrounding the VW letters--which is a design commonly seen encircling the Nazi swastika--was ordered to be removed by the occupying British forces just after the war, softening up the image a little. Hohlwein remains intact and un-de-nazified..
*It is interesting to note that Hohlwein's post-WWI history frequently escapes the mention of stores selling his posters. I've noticed too that his death date is often conveniently listed as 1939, though he survived the war.
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