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:
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