Post #77475 by aquarj on Mon, Feb 23, 2004 2:18 PM

Some great stuff there Bong. I really dig old surf culture too.

I'm sure Bong has seen em, but anyway at the Huntington Beach surf museum there's some stuff that shows the crossover between mainlander tiki and CA surf culture. Like a couple of moai surf trophies. I have a picture somewhere, maybe I can post later.

Bong, are you sure that's a medal that Duke actually won? If so, that's pretty cool. But I think there were a lot of pendants and "surfer's jewelry" made like that, shaped like the "Kaiser's" german cross, with a surfer added to the front, and the standard WWI german cross marks on the back (the crown, the W, and the 1914).

I have seen alot of the Iron Cross design in surf items, anyone know why?

Without any handy references for details, I think the maltese cross goes way back. Don't wanna get into the swastika, but that's another example of an icon with a loooonng history that was appropriated by the Germans. But I think the Germans used the maltese cross as a military symbol as early as the 1800s, with one particular well-known version that was a prized medal in WWI. The story as I've heard it is that basically American soldiers took these medals as trophies in WWI (along with other things like spiked helmets), and brought them home. It's pretty powerful iconography in both forms - as originally intended decorations or uniforms for German soldiers, or as trophies of a war won. So the same items started showing up on the person of tough guys here in the US, and spreading among clubs of motorcyclists and surfers. And eventually the iron cross was appropriated as the surfer's cross, with a completely different meaning from how the Germans appropriated the same symbol.

I haven't seen an example, but supposedly Hitler re-appropriated the iron cross in WWII, replacing the crown or the W with a swastika. Just another example of re-using powerful iconography. Unfortunately, this led to a common misconception that the "surfer's cross" was somehow connected with Nazi leanings, even though it evolved separately in this country to have a completely different meaning among surfers, hot-rodders, skateboarders and the like. And the waters have gotten even more muddied when neo-Nazis started re-appropriating some of the same icons.

Anyway, I think when it was popular with surfers, the iron cross was just a cool looking medallion that sort of evoked "surfing valor", and that's just about it.

-Randy