In the Western world the swastika is
synonymous with fascism, but it goes back thousands of years and has been used
as a symbol of good fortune in almost every culture in the world. As more
evidence emerges of its long pre-Nazi history in Europe, can this ancient sign
ever shake off its evil associations?
In the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit, swastika means "well-being". The
symbol has been used by Hindus, Buddhists and Jains for millennia and is
commonly assumed to be an Indian sign.
Early Western travellers to Asia were inspired by its positive and ancient
associations and started using it back home. By the beginning of the 20th
Century there was a huge fad for the swastika as a benign good luck symbol.
In his book The Swastika: Symbol Beyond Redemption? US graphic design writer
Steven Heller shows how it was enthusiastically adopted in the West as an
architectural motif, on advertising and product design.
20th Century fad: Fruit packaging, a Coca-Cola
pendant, and a pack of cards, all from the US
"Coca-Cola used it. Carlsberg used it on their beer bottles. The Boy Scouts
adopted it and the Girls' Club of America called their magazine Swastika. They
would even send out swastika badges to their young readers as a prize for
selling copies of the magazine," he says.
It was used by American military units during World War One and it could be
seen on RAF planes as late as 1939. Most of these benign uses came to a halt in
the 1930s as the Nazis rose to power in Germany.
The Nazi use of the swastika stems from the work of 19th Century German
scholars translating old Indian texts, who noticed similarities between their
own language and Sanskrit. They concluded that Indians and Germans must have had
a shared ancestry and imagined a race of white god-like warriors they called
Aryans.
A Hindu boy with a shaved head, and a giant vase at a
Buddhist temple in Japan
This idea was seized upon by anti-Semitic nationalist groups who appropriated
the swastika as an Aryan symbol to boost a sense of ancient lineage for the
Germanic people.
The black straight-armed hakenkreuz (hooked
cross) on the distinctive white circle and red background of the Nazi flag would
become the most hated symbol of the 20th Century, inextricably linked to the
atrocities committed under the Third Reich.
"For the Jewish people the swastika is a symbol of fear, of suppression, and
of extermination. It's a symbol that we will never ever be able to change," says
93-year-old Holocaust survivor Freddie Knoller. "If they put the swastika on
gravestones or synagogues, it puts a fear into us. Surely it shouldn't happen
again."
The swastika was banned in Germany at the end of the war and Germany tried
unsuccessfully to introduce an EU-wide ban in 2007.
The irony is that the swastika is more European in origin than most people
realise. Archaeological finds have long demonstrated that the swastika is a very
old symbol, but ancient examples are by no means limited to India. It was used
by the Ancient Greeks, Celts, and Anglo-Saxons and some of the oldest examples
have been found in Eastern Europe, from the Baltic to the Balkans .
If you want to see just how deeply rooted the swastika pattern is in Europe,
a good place to start is Kiev where the National Museum of the History of
Ukraine has an impressive range of exhibits.
Among the museum's most highly prized treasures is a small ivory figurine of
a female bird. Made from the tusk of a mammoth, it was found in 1908 at the
Palaeolithic settlement of Mezin near the Russian border.
Find out more
Mukti Jain Campion is the producer and presenter of Reclaiming
the Swastika. You can listen on BBC Radio 4 at 11:00 on Friday 24 October -
or for another 30 days on the BBC iPlayer.
On the torso of the bird is engraved an intricate
meander pattern of joined up swastikas. It's the oldest identified swastika
pattern in the world and has been radio carbon-dated to an astonishing 15,000
years ago. The bird was found with a number of phallic objects which supports
the idea that the swastika pattern was used as a fertility symbol.
In 1965 a palaeontologist called Valentina Bibikova discovered that the
swastika meander pattern on the bird is very similar to the naturally occurring
pattern visible on a cross-section of ivory. Could it be that the Palaeolithic
makers of the figurine were simply reflecting what they saw in nature - the huge
mammoth they associated with well-being and fertility?
Single swastikas began to appear in the Neolithic Vinca culture across
south-eastern Europe around 7,000 years ago. But it's in the Bronze Age that
they became more widespread across the whole of Europe. In the Museum's
collection there are clay pots with single swastikas encircling their upper half
which date back to around 4,000 years ago. When the Nazis occupied Kiev in World
War Two they were so convinced that these pots were evidence of their own Aryan
ancestors that they took them back to Germany. (They were returned after the
war.)
In the Museum's Grecian collection, the swastika is visible as the
architectural ornament which has come to be known as the Greek key pattern,
widely used on tiles and textiles to this day.
Left: Grecian architectural swastikas in the Kiev
museum. Right: Brooklyn Academy of Music (New York)
The Ancient Greeks also used single swastika motifs to decorate their pots
and vases. One fragment in the collection from around 7th Century BCE shows a
swastika with limbs like unfurling tendrils painted under the belly of a goat.
Fragments of a 12th Century princess's collar
Perhaps the most surprising exhibit in the museum is of fragile textile
fragments that have survived from the 12th Century AD. They are believed to
belong to the dress collar of a Slav princess, embroidered with gold crosses and
swastikas to ward off evil.
The swastika remained a popular embroidery motif in Eastern Europe and Russia
right up to World War Two. A Russian author called Pavel Kutenkov has identified
nearly 200 variations across the region. But the hakenkreuz remains a highly
charged symbol. In 1941 Kiev was the site of one of the worst Nazi mass murders
of the Holocaust when nearly 34,000 Jews were rounded up and killed at the
ravine of Babi Yar.
In Western Europe the use of indigenous ancient swastikas petered out long
before the modern era but examples can be found in many places such as the
famous Bronze Age Swastika Stone on Ilkley
Moor in Yorkshire.
Some people think this long history can help revive the symbol in Europe as
something positive. Peter Madsen, owner of an upmarket tattoo parlour in
Copenhagen says the swastika is an element of Norse mythology that holds a
strong appeal to many Scandinavians. He is one of the founders of last year's
Learn to Love the Swastika Day on 13 November, when tattoo artists around the
world offered free swastikas, to raise awareness of the symbol's long
multicultural past.
"The swastika is a symbol of love and Hitler abused it. We're not trying to
reclaim the hakenkreuz. That would be impossible. Nor is it something we want
people to forget," he says.
One of the supporters of the Learn to Love the
Swastika movement
"We just want people to know that the swastika comes in many other forms,
none of which have ever been used for anything bad. We are also trying to show
the right-wing fascists that it's wrong to use this symbol. If we can educate
the public about the true meanings of the swastika, maybe we can take it away
from the fascists."
But for those like Freddie Knoller who have experienced the horrors of
fascism, the prospect of learning to love the swastika is not so easy.
"For the people who went through the Holocaust, we will always remember what
the swastika was like in our life - a symbol of pure evil," he says.
"We didn't know how the symbol dates back so many thousands of years ago. But
I think it's interesting for people to learn that the swastika was not always
the symbol of fascism."
