The post-1945 legacy of the Third Reich's material culture has seen increasing attention in recent years from historians as well as from other scholars. Noteworthy studies have focused on the built environment, including not only Nazi monuments such as the Nuremberg Nazi party rally grounds (Sharon MacDonald, Difficult Heritage [2000]) but also physical remnants which are somewhat less obviously politically coded (Rudy Koshar, From Monuments to Traces [2000]). The postwar fate of smaller political symbols like the swastika flag, Nazi party badges, or various military medals, disseminated by the millions during the Third Reich, has received much less scholarly attention. The reluctance to study the legacy of small Nazi objects might be connected to their continual existence in the private sphere, a reality that many of us perceive as upsetting, let alone when this reality comes in the form of private collections. A recent study pays attention to these objects from the perspective of museum exhibitions (Chloe Paver, Exhibiting the Nazi Past [2018]). Seriously exploring what happened to Nazi objects after the war and how their meanings and functions evolved in different social and political contexts outside museums holds the promise, however, of telling us something different and possibly important about the complex cultural effects of National Socialism both in Germany and beyond. Michael Hughes's The Anarchy of Nazi Memorabilia certainly brings to the fore the huge moral challenge which the existence of these objects in private hands represents and why we should care about this topic, both as scholars and as citizens.
The book mainly conceptualizes things as – social and economic – commodities. But how much does it help to attempt tracing Nazi objects, following Arjun Appadurai, “from commodity production to commodity consumption” (4) when, as Hughes is well aware, these things’ meanings, functions, and social effects are so intrinsically intertwined with the political system of Nazism, and this system's complex afterlife, that it makes them a very special kind of “commodity”? In the same vein, Michael Thompson's categories of a transient, rubbish, or durable state of objects aims to understand the social and economic value of objects in different contexts and situations but pays no attention to the specificities of objects that are meant to represent a certain definition of the social as a whole, which is precisely what makes Nazi symbols a problematic legacy. Leora Auslander's work on Cultural Revolutions (2009) would have been a more useful guide for this aspect of the book. The author eventually resorts to describing Nazi objects as “metaphysically toxic artefacts” (134, 143). This seems a fitting enough expression, but since the metaphysical is withdrawn from our historical understanding, it does not really open doors to more interesting historical questions about what the cultural experience of this metaphysical toxicity entails and how precisely its historical emergence relates to the emergence of the collectors’ market. The less theorized thread which, however, shapes much of the book is about the moral dilemma the experience of the “metaphysically toxic” produces.
Michael Hughes asks both how Nazi symbols contributed to the creation of the Third Reich and how they subsequently “managed to be transformed” from their original function “into highly prized collectors’ items?” (3) The first half of the book presents a historical overview of a number of symbolic items, from the introduction of swastika flags and Nazi party badges during the Weimar years, via badges connected to the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft programs, to, finally, a number of medals and awards that shaped the war enterprise. Combining what is known from literature with often insightful quotes from additional materials such as novels, these sections provide an informative and useful overview. Hughes contextualizes the objects in their time while also including often neglected technical and economic aspects such as the materials used or who produced the objects and how. Chapters regularly include a discussion of these items’ recent fate on the collectors’ market and that market's own economic rationality in which the development of prizes is connected to a certain notion of authenticity that, for instance, makes Nazi daggers only valuable if they still carry the swastika and not if that symbol's absence testifies to the postwar denazification of the object. Hughes often points to the myriad ways in which these objects carry traces of violence yet simultaneously hide these traces, especially in the collectors’ fetishizing gaze, thus representing the central moral dilemma.
The second half of the book briefly describes the postwar transition, the denazification efforts in Germany, the practice by Allied soldiers of taking Nazi symbols as war trophies or souvenirs, and the legal situation around Nazi symbols in Germany, the UK, the US, and France. The following discussion of (several decades of) this market contains the most original material, based in part on interviews that the author conducted with a number of collectors. We learn that their interest in Nazi objects often started in their childhoods, that they usually distance themselves from Nazism, yet have often derived not only their collection material but often also their information and background stories from former Wehrmacht soldiers or SS members. Much that would be interesting to explore further is only hinted at in passing, such as the importance of feature films for generating collectors’ interest in Nazi symbols, the relationship between different phases in international Holocaust memory, and the evolution of collecting and trading, as well as the importance of different national contexts for what collecting means in Germany, the US, and the UK. The author's most important conclusion is a moral one: collections of Nazi symbols should not be owned privately but belong in museums.
