Norman Spinrad

But the phallic symbolism hardly stops with the Great Truncheon of Held. The outstretched-arm salute which forms an obsessive motif throughout the novel is patently a phallic gesture. Jaggar reviews one of the orgiastic military parades from the pinnacle of an enormous cylindrical tower which is described in rather obviously phallic terms.

Later, the pillar of fire in the center of the burning city of Bora becomes an immense phallic totem around which Jaggar parades his victorious troops. And in the final scene of the novel, a rocket quite literally filled with Jaggar's seed rises "on a pillar of fire to fecundate the stars," as the orgasmic climax of a bizarre military spectacle which Jaggar clearly experiences as a somewhat heavy-handed analog of sexual intercourse.

There is'no doubt that a great deal of Lord of the Swastika's appeal to the unsophisticated comes from the blatant phallic symbolism which all but dominates the book. In a sense, the entire novel is a piece of sublimated pornography, a phallic orgy from beginning to end, with the sexuality symbolized in terms of grandiose fetishistic military displays and orgiastic bouts of unreal violence.

Since this phallic sexuality of violence and military pageantry is a common transference in western society, the book gains great power by keying itself into one of the most prevalent sexual pathologies of our civilization.

What is open to dispute is whether or not Hitler was consciously aware of what he was doing.

Those who would claim that Hitler employed his sys-tematic phallic imagery as a consciously calculated device can rightly claim that its consistent application points toward an act of self-conscious creation. Further, Hitler displays a cogent understanding of how visual symbols and events may be used to manipulate the mass psyche. One can believe that the mass torchlight rallies he describes in the book would in fact inflame the passions of real mobs hi a manner roughly akin to what takes place in the novel.

The adoption of the swastika colors by groups in our own society is additional evidence that Hitler knew full well how to devise visual images capable of having a powerful effect upon the viewer. Thus, by extension, it becomes superflcially reasonable to suppose that Hitler deliberately invested Lord of the Swastika with phallic imagery in order to capture the rapt attention of the unsophisticated.

A cursory study of commercial science fantasy would seem to confirm this contention. The hero with the magi-247

cal sword is a common, indeed virtually universal, feature of so-called sword and sorcery novels. Such novels are written according to a simple formula whereby this super-masculine figure, aided by his unusually potent weapon, with which he has an obvious phallic identification, over-comes great obstacles to gain his inevitable triumph. Hitler was active in the microcosm of "science-fiction random"

for decades, and in fact many such fantasies were reviewed in his own fanzine. It is therefore reasonable to assume that he was quite familiar with the genre; in fact two or three of his earlier novels approached the sword-and-sorcery vein.

Lord of the Swastika is at least schematically a typical pulp sword-and-sorcery novel. The hero (Jaggar) receives the phallic weapon as a symbol of his rightful supremacy and then triumphantly fights his way through a series of gory battles to final victory. Aside from the political allegory and the more specialized pathologies which I will deal with later, it is the obsessional consistency and intensity of the phallic symbolism which distinguishes Lord of the Swastika from a host of similar science-fantasy novels.

This leads to the conclusion that Hitler made a straightforward study of the nature of the appeal of the sword-and-sorcery genre, and self-consciously increased the pathological appeal of his own book beyond the ordinary by strengthening the phallic symbolism and making it that much more blatant and pervasive. This would make Lord of the Swastika a cynical exploitation of sexual pathology quite common to this genre, though of such a thorough-going nature that its power far exceeds that of its more timid models.

However, I believe that this theory may be disproved both by internal evidence within the novel and by the nature of the science-fiction genre itself.

For one thing. Lord of the Swastika displays abundant evidence of mental aberration on the part of its author quite aside from the question of phallic symbolism. The fetishism which permeates the novel could hardly be consciously designed to appeal to the average unsophisticated reader. Throughout the book, an obsessive amount of attention is paid to uniforms, especially the tight black leather uniforms of the SS. The frequent conjunction of repetitious description of "shiny black leather," "gleaming chrome," "high'steel-soled boots," and similar articles of clothing and adornment with phallic gestures such as the 248