Norman Spinrad - The Iron Dream

“But my fellow Helder, there is one final glory that I have withheld until now,” he finally continued, unable to keep from breaking into a broad grin. “I myself have contributed cells to the cloning vats. This rocket and every one that follows it out into the trackless reaches of interstellar space for the next ten million years will be commanded by a clone grown from my own flesh and therefore my genetic equivalent, suited by destiny and pedigree to be a leader of men. Thus our colonies shall not fail no matter what manner of hostile aliens they may face under foreign suns, for the troops that will exterminate these subhumans horrors shall be none but the finest SS purebreds, and the leaders shall be created in my own genetic image! Hail Heldon! Hail the Swastika! Hail the Master Race! Hail the conquest of the universe!”

As the answering earthquake chanting of “Hail Jaggar!” reverberated every molecule in the air, the huge ring of SS troops began to march round the rocket and Feric’s platform, kicking the heels of their steel-soled boots high in the air with every step and then bringing them down with a force that was quite literally earth-shaking. Faster and faster these magnificent specimens in snug black leather marched, kicking their heels ever higher, until the platform and the rocket were surrounded by a whirling circle of slick black leather, and the universe shook with the thunder of Helder boots.

Then, as a single man, these two hundred thousand tall blond SS clones snapped their arms out in the greatest massed Party salute in history and held them in this outstretched position as the chant of “Hail Jaggar!” continued to rise toward the heavens from millions of fervent throats.

Faster and faster the marching troops whirled around Feric, kicking their heels skyward with ever increasing vigor and force, as if attempting to smash through the vault in the sky^with the steel soles of their boots while the massed chanting merged with the rhythm of the falling boots, a staccato thunder that filled and shook the universe and pounded with the blood racing in Feric’s skull.

Feric felt the sound and the glory permeate every cell of his body with an incredible joyous fire; his blood pounded like racial thunder through his veins, faster and faster. It seemed finally as if he must fly apart and burst in a million pieces with ecstasy.

At this climactic moment, when he could bear the preternatural joy no longer, he threw a small switch.

With a deafening bellow, a magnificent billow of orange flame spurted out of the rocket. Every throat in Heldon joined with Feric’s in a wordless cry of joyous triumph as the seed of the Swastika rose on a pillar of fire to fecundate the stars.

The popularity gained by Adolf Hitler’s final science-fiction novel, Lord of the Swastika, in the five years since his death is an indisputable fact. The novel won the Hugo award given by the inner fraternity of science-fiction enthusiasts as the best science-fiction novel of 1954. While this may be a somewhat dubious literary credential, it surely would have pleased Hitler, who lived among these “science-fiction fans” throughout his career in the United States, and considered himself one of them, going so far as to edit and publish his own amateur “fanzine” even while working as a full-time professional writer.

Of wider significance is the book’s popularity and the adoption of the swastika motif and colors created in it among as diverse a spectrum of social groups and organizations as the Christian Anti-Communist Legion, various “outlaw motorcycle gangs,” and the American Knights of Bushido. Obviously, this science-fiction novel has struck some chord in the contemporary non-communist mind that raises its appeal far beyond the limited bounds of the science-fantasy genre.

On a purely literary level, this phenomenon seems rather inexplicable. Lord of the Swastika was written in the space of six weeks under contract to a paperback publisher in something of a frenzy shortly before Hitler’s death in 1953. If we are to believe the gossip rife in the science-fiction “fanzines” of the day. Hitler had been behaving erratically for several years, being subject to fits of trembling and bouts of uncontrollable rage that frequently lapsed into near-hebephrenic rantings. Although the actual cause of Hitler’s death was a cerebral hemorrhage, these symptoms at least hint at complications of tertiary syphilis.

Thus, the literary totem of the present devotees of the swastika and its peculiar code was, in cold point of fact, written in six weeks by a commercial pulp writer who never displayed serious literary talent, and who may well have written the book while suffering from the early stages of paresis.

While the prose may display a certain praiseworthy competence, considering that Hitler learned English as a mature adult, one cannot for a moment seriously compare Hitler’s mastery of his adopted literary language to that of Joseph Conrad, for instance, a Pole who came to our tongue at a similarly advanced age. Awkward traces of Germanic sentence structure and usage are evident throughout Lord of the Swastika.

There is admittedly a certain raw power in many passages of the novel, but this seems to be more the result of psychopathology than of conscious, controlled literary craftsmanship. Where Hitler may be said to excel as a writer is in his visual conceptualization of basically unrealistic or improbable scenes—notably those of extravagant battle, or the grand guignol military pageantry which festoons the book. But this power of visualization can easily be traced to Hitler’s prior career as a magazine illustrator, rather than to any specific conscious mastery of prose style.

The imagery of the novel is something else again, an area of legitimate dispute. As anyone with even a cursory layman’s knowledge of human psychology will realize, Lord of the Swastika is filled with the most blatant phallic symbolisms and allusions. A description of Feric Jaggar’s magic weapon, the so-called Great Truncheon of Held:

“The shaft was a gleaming rod of ... metal full four feet long and thick around as a man’s forearm ... the oversize headball was a life-sized steel fist, and a hero’s fist at that.” If this is not a description of a fantasy penis, what is? Further, everything about the Great Truncheon points to a phallic identification between Hitler’s hero, Feric Jaggar, and his weapon. Not only is the truncheon fashioned in the shape of an enormous penis, but it is the source and symbol of Jaggar’s power. Only Jaggar, the hero of the novel, can wield the Great Truncheon; it is the phallus of maximum size, potency, and status, the sceptre of rule in more ways than one. When he forces Stag Stopa to kiss the head of his weapon as a gesture of fealty, the phallic symbolism of the’ Great Truncheon reaches a grotesque apex.

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.