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The Swastika: Constructing the Symbol. By Malcolm Quinn. London: Routledge, 1994. 176pp. ISBN 0 415 1009 5
Few symbols are so immediately recognised as the swastika. Since becoming the determinative for an imperialist and racist Germany under Hitler, it remains beyond rehabilitation. It has thus lost the intrinsic properties of a symbol, ambiguity and multivalence. Quinn's book attempts to trace the history of the appropriation of a widely distributed ornament to a message-laden icon of National Socialism and contemporary neo-fascist groups. He places the construction of the symbol within nineteenth-century discourse about nationalism and subsequent ideas about Aryan racial heritage. When Heinrich Schliemann, for instance, discovered swastika-like decorations on...