Swastika Night #1937club

Written by Katharine Burdekin, but published under the male pseudonym Murray Constantine, Swastika Night has got to be one of the earliest “what if the Nazis won?” novels, given that it was published before Britain even entered the war. Constantine takes a long, and a dim, view: seven hundred years (!) later, the Nazi Empire rules half the world, while the Japanese have the rest. As one character explains, there are two ways to maintain an empire of this size: assimilate all your subject peoples (à la Rome), or stratify your society ruthlessly. The latter is the choice these Nazis have made: Germans are better than any other nationality, Knights (a hereditary priestly and administrative class) are better than any other Germans, Christians are tolerated only in their own ghettos, Jews (of course) don’t exist, and women–all women–are subhuman. Literacy is permitted only for men whose work absolutely requires it. Even then, there’s nothing to read except for technical manuals and the “Hitler Bible”. State religion is based on the worship of Adolf Hitler–always represented in statuary as a seven-foot muscular Aryan Übermensch–as God incarnate.

Into this established world comes Alfred Alfredson, an English man on pilgrimage to the holy sites of Germany. I like that Constantine is vague but evocative about what these actually are; we hear mention of Munich as the Holy City containing some relic known as the Sacred Aeroplane, and other sites known as the Holy Forest and Holy Mountain, but there’s no exploration of what events they memorialise, and that’s preferable. We can fill in the blanks from the names alone. Alfred is friends with a German Nazi agricultural labourer named Hermann, who previously spent time in England. Hermann beats a teenage German boy to death for attempting to rape a Christian girl (not because rape is a crime, although there are rules about attacking the underage, but because intercourse with a Christian should be repulsive for a German). This brings both men to the attention of the local Knight, von Hess, who immediately sees something trustworthy in Alfred (why? Unclear) and entrusts him with a great and terrible secret: an authentic photo of Hitler which gives the lie to his portrayal in German culture, and a handwritten book that memorialises the lost civilisation, history, and culture of the pre-Nazi world.

Swastika Night pre-dates Nineteen Eighty Four, but clearly influenced it. In particular , the many arguments between Alfred and von Hess seem to pre-figure the excerpts from Goldstein’s work and the conversations between Winston Smith and O’Brien in the latter. Similarly, both books suffer from an excess of argumentation, although Orwell’s book is technically better, and more famous, because it manages its philosophical content somewhat better. What Constantine is good at is imagining the deleterious, indeed self-destructive, traits of a fascist empire. The focus on violence and bloodshed, and the utter denigration of the female, is going to wreck the Nazi Empire within a few decades, von Hess guesses. There finally isn’t a war on anymore, which is one problem. And there aren’t enough boys being born, which is another. The women, somehow, subconsciously, are producing more and more girls.

It’s a really interesting, and horrifying, idea and premise. The biggest issue is that I don’t buy it. Not that I don’t buy gross misogyny and the fetishization of violence, but I don’t buy that every trace of pre-Nazi culture could be destroyed. I simply don’t. Von Hess claims it took about a hunded years and cost a fortune, but it was done; obviously this was an analogue world, not a digital one, but even so I don’t buy it. Alfred belongs to a resistance group (bafflingly only mentioned once); if such a thing, even toothless, exists after 700 years of Nazism, I simply don’t believe that organised underground preservation of cultural material wouldn’t have happened. From that, all else falls down too: men are indeed capable of hating and demeaning women to this extent, and internalised misogyny is also a thing, but Constantine seems to argue that the global population of women acquiesced pretty readily in their Reduction (it’s capitalised), and again, I don’t buy it. Not in the 1930s, not in the 2630s. Not all women, all at once, everywhere. It gives far too much weight to a desire to conform, not nearly enough to the possession of individual mind.

It’s still totally fascinating as a document from 1937, though–who else realised this early what the stakes might be? Apart from Eric Ambler in Epitaph for a Spy, perhaps.

Read for Kaggsy and Simon’s 1937 Club!