Wolf traps and steppe quagmires

We recently sold my mother-in-law’s apartment in Varkaus, my wife’s hometown in the heart of the Finnish lake district 200 miles from Helsinki. It’s been over a year since my mother-in-law moved to a nursing home, so it was high time we did something with the apartment that we use only occasionally on visits to Varkaus. Selling the apartment, of course, required emptying and cleaning the place, which means discovering the kinds of random personal items and keepsakes accumulated over the years by a long-married couple. One of these little items was a lapel pin, with a distinctive emblem and the obviously German word “Rüsselsheim”. 

I was curious why my in-laws would have such a obscure little thing. The word “Rüsselsheim” said nothing to me, and I found the symbol on the pin a little unsettling. Then my wife informed me that Rüsselsheim, Germany, is a sister city to Varkaus. Obviously, this was a trinket handed out to promote friendly international relations at an excruciatingly local level. Varkaus, after all, is not a big place. 

Rüsselsheim am Main is about three times larger, according to its Wikipedia page, from which I also learned about the symbols on the lapel pin, the Rüsslsheim coat of arms. The zig-zag, Z-shaped symbol is a “Doppelhaken” (double hook), sometimes called a “Wolfsangel” or “wolf’s hook”, due to the gruesome fact that it resembles a metal hook used in Germany in medieval times to trap wolves. It was literally used like a fishhook to snare a wolf unlucky enough to take the bait of raw meat surrounding the Z-shaped metal. 

There must be something intrinsically appealing about the stylized rendering of this instrument of death, maybe something in its simple esthetics, because over time the Doppelhaken became associated with magical powers and strong symbolism -- which maybe not surprisingly led to it being widely adopted by the Nazi Party. For this reason, Doppelhaken symbols are now banned in Germany, except when used – as in the case of the lapel pin we found in Varkaus – as part of a traditional coat of arms. Outside Germany it is sadly still used by some far-right movements, such as the Azov Battalion in Ukraine. 

(Interestingly, the Finnish word for swastika is “hakaristi”, or “hook cross”. Also, Varkaus’ own coat of arms features an actual arm holding a different kind of hook, an anchor.) 

The coat of arms of Varkaus.

Anyway, I say there must be something appealing in the simple esthetics of Z-shapes, because it is remarkable how quickly the letter Z has been adopted in Russia as the symbol of patriotism in less than two weeks following Vladimir Putin’s criminal invasion of Ukraine. And this only because the Russian army painted the Z-symbol conspicuously on many of its tanks. Clearly, the image of Russian tanks marked with Zs inspired somebody to turn that simple symbol into a new patriotic fetish. And this despite many of those Z-marked tanks now seem ingloriously to be bogged down in the mud of the Ukraine steppes, or otherwise destroyed. But the Russian public doesn’t see those images. 

It seems many folks in Russia are now rallying around this new symbol of Russian pride, a letter that does not exist in the Russian alphabet, by displaying it with the same zeal that Trump supporters in America banish their “Make America Great Again” hat or “Let’s Go Brandon” flags. To drive the point home even further, Russians are also combining the Z with the another widely used “virtue signal” of Russian ethnonationalism, the St. George ribbon. I had noticed those orange-and-black-striped ribbons tied on car rear-view mirrors everywhere in St. Petersburg the last time we were there – which, as things are going now, might well be THE very last time we visit St. Petersburg. 

So, now all “right-thinking” Russians – like Germans under the Third Reich – are enthusiastically embracing a symbol that harkens back to medieval times based solely on the fact that the Russian army invading Ukraine painted Zs on their tanks, rocket launchers, and other modern instruments of death. What a strange world we live in.

Russian children presenting their country's newest patriotic fetish.