Norman Spinrad

Party salute, heel clicking, precision marching, and the like is dear indication of unselfconscious fetishism on the part of Hitler of a particularly morbid sort, hardly likely to appeal to any but the most thoroughly disturbed personality.

Indeed, in the book Hitler seems to assume that masses of men in fetishistic uniforms marching in precise displays and displaying phallic gestures and paraphernalia will have a powerful appeal to ordinary human beings. Feric Jaggar comes to power in Heldon through little more than a grotesque series of increasingly grandiose phallic displays.

This is undoubtedly phallic fetishism on the part of the author, since the alternative conclusion is to accept the ridiculous notion that an entire nation would throw itself at the feet of a leader simply on the basis of mass displays of public fetishism, orgies of blatant phallic symbolism, -

and mass rallies enlivened with torchlight and rabid oratory. Obviously, such a mass national psychosis could never occur in the real world; Hitler's assumption that it not only could happen but would be an expression of so-called racial will proves that he himself was suffering from such a malady.

Beyond the fetishism, the novel displays internal inconsistencies even on the gross level of commercial science fiction that are sure indications that the author's contact with reality faded more and more as he became involved with his own obsessions while writing what no doubt started out as simply another commercial potboiler.

The novel opens in a world where the highest technology is represented by the steam engine and the crude flying machine and progresses in a ridiculously short stretch of fictional time through television, machine guns, modem tanks, jet fighters, artificially grown human beings, and finally an interstellar spaceship. Hitler makes no attempt whatever to justify any of this; it is wish-fulfillment from beginning to end. Admittedly, unjustified and inconsistent wish-fulfillment fantasies are common in low-grade science fiction, but hardly to this ludicrously obvious extent. Hitler seems to assume that the very existence of a hero like Feric Jaggar would call into being these quantum-jumps in science and technology. Given the close author identification with a hero of this sort, this is a symptom of the grossest narcissism.

Perhaps even more pathological are Hitler's secretional and fecal obsessions. "Foul odors," "pestilences," "reeking 249

sties," "fetid cesspools," and the like abound in the book.

Again and again. Hitler displays his morbid dread of body secretions and processes. He is forever describing the hated Zind Warriors as "drooling," "defecating," "urinating," and so forth. Monsters are covered with slime clearly reminiscent of nasal mucous. The forces of evil are described in terms of noxious secretions, filth, foul odors and excretions, whereas the forces of good are "spotless,"

"gleaming," and "precise," their equipment and persons having shiny surfaces burnished to sterile glosses. The anality of this dichotomy should be clear even to the layman.

The violence in the book verges on the psychotic. Hitler describes the most ghastly slaughters as if he not only finds them attractive but assumes that his readers will be likewise enthralled. There is no doubt that the treatment of violence in Lord of the Swastika adds a special morbid appeal to the book. Here the reader is treated, if that is the word, to something that may be unique in all literature: the most ghastly, perverse, and loathsome violence described by a writer who obviously intends such hideous spectacles to be edifying, uplifting, and even expressions of nobility. De Sade himself did not go so far, for his horrors are at worst meant to be sexually titillating, whereas Hitler equates mass destruction, ruthless slaughter, nauseating violent excesses, and genocide with pious self-righteousness, honor and virtue, and, moreover, writes as if he fully expects the average reader to share his point of view as self-evident truth. Surely this is clinching evidence that the power of Lord of the Swastika lies not in the skill of the writer but in the unbridled pathological fantasies which he has unself-consciously committed to print.

And if this were not enough, consider the astonishing fact that not a single woman appears as a character in the book. It may be fairly said that asexuality is a hallmark of the typical science-fantasy novel; women appear only as chaste stock figures, token romantic interest for the hero, prizes to be won. However, Lord of the Swastika not only lacks this traditional romantic interest, it goes to incredible lengths to deny the very need for the female half of the human race. Finally, all reproduction is to proceed from the cloning of the all-male SS, a weird sort of male parthenogenesis. <

It is tempting to add this denial of the very existence of women to the phallic fetishism and come up with a diag-250