What Can We Learn from the Iconography of Violence?

Scholars have recently declared the emergence of a “visual turn” in the social sciences, as a new wave of research examining the visual and iconographic aspects of a wide variety of social settings has emerged. This paper suggests that violence and radicalism can also be examined fruitfully through a visual lens, examining a unique digital archive the author created, which includes thousands of contemporary and historical images of Nazi and far right wing propaganda, clothing, and commercial products as part of a project analyzing the emergence of the far right wing commercial scene and its use of symbols over time in Germany. Drawing on the literature on iconography and iconology, especially Panovsky’s work on the meaning of images and how they can be interpreted and his assertion that the meaning of images is linked to stories and allegories—this paper uses examples of commercialized symbols and iconography from the far right scene in Germany to argue that the decoding and interpretation of images depicting nationalist, xenophobic, and violent allegories can help understand the appeal of radical and extremist movements for youth.