National flags have played significant roles in the political and media image production of historical fascism. The current recirculation and updating of this archive of semiotic demagoguery, which has always been kept open, proves difficult to understand and cumbersome to regulate. Taking its cue from a notorious event in Berlin during the first Covid summer, the so-called “storming of the Reichstag” on August 29, 2020, this essay discusses: aspects of existing socio-anthropological studies on the totemic dimensions and death cult activated in Nazi iconology; how this iconological heritage lives on in contemporary manifestations of right-wing extremist and neo-fascist protests (directed against buildings and flag protocols embodying the self-understanding of liberal democracies); and attempts to legally regulate the semiotic maneuvers of the right performed by the use of controversial flags.
Tom Holert (Thu,) studied this question.