Swastika Night

[Dave Monroe]

Burdekin, Katharine.  Swastika Night.
   London: The Feminist Press, 1985 [1937].

http://www.feministpress.org/books/katharine-burdekin/swastika-night
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Av1B0iUqRPIC

Swastika Night: Nineteen Eighty-Four's lost twin
While Orwell's dystopia is embedded in our culture, an equally
powerful novel exploring parallel themes is almost completely unknown


This week's Berlin Wall ceremonies marked a golden moment in the
history of that most benighted of cities. They also reminded us of the
incredibly enduring power of Nineteen Eighty-Four: it's almost
impossible to write or think about totalitarianism without slipping
into that chilling Orwellian lexicon. Big Brother, Newspeak, Thought
Police, unperson, Room 101 … Nineteen Eighty-Four has percolated
through the culture, language and collective mind with a thoroughness
and absoluteness O'Brien would be proud of.

Berlin, of course, is unusual in that it felt both edges of the
totalitarian sword: the leftist dictatorship of George Orwell's
nightmares, and Nazism. Which prompts a timely question: why are the
concepts and characters of Nineteen Eighty-Four so culturally iconic,
so deeply embedded, while the equally great Swastika Night is
unheralded in the pantheon of classic dystopian novels?

Orwell's book is one of the most famous in the English language, with
perennially enormous sales, film adaptations, introductions by Thomas
Pynchon. Hardly anybody has ever heard of Katharine Burdekin nor her
novel, published under the pseudonym Murray Constantine in 1937. My
copy was reissued by the Feminist Press after a hiatus of decades.

And yet in many ways, Swastika Night can be seen as a companion piece
to Nineteen Eighty-Four, exploring the other side of the totalitarian
coin with equal insight, prescience and humanity. Both were written in
the same era; both offer forensic dissections of the psychopathology
of power; both are masterful imaginings of a possible future drawn
from the dreadful but logical conclusion of these insane ideologies.
There are even specific similarities between the two: a hero slowly
awakening in consciousness, the cult of political leadership, the
rewriting of history, a secret text which reveals the truth, a
photograph on which the plot twists. While Nineteen Eighty-Four is
perhaps more elegantly written, these books can be considered equals;
and in some ways Swastika Night is an even more remarkable artistic
and intellectual achievement.

The book takes places seven centuries after the Axis won the second
world war (now called the Twenty Year War). Germany now dominates
Europe and Africa, Japan everywhere else. "Inferior races" have been
wiped out, the few remaining Christians are persecuted. The Nazi realm
– a weird, retro-futuristic feudal society – is based on extreme
militarism, conformity and patriarchy, and a bizarre quasi-religion
based on a divine Hitler, who literally exploded from the head of God
the Thunderer. Hitler was seven foot tall with long blond hair, and
almost single-handedly won the war.

Also, a sickening misogyny has been given legal force: rape is no
longer a crime, and women exist merely to breed the next generation of
Teutonic supermen. They are cowed and brutalised, hunchbacked,
literally herded together. Muscular boys and men are considered
beautiful; women are soft, stupid, disgusting. An Englishman, Alfred,
visiting a friend in Germany, meets one of the ruling knights and
learns a potentially fatal piece of information: far fewer female
babies are being born. For so long told they are non-people, women are
now subconsciously breeding themselves – and the Aryan race – out of
existence. Thus begins his slow recovery from the disease of hatred
and ignorance, and towards a denouement which hints at a more hopeful
future.

Though a huge leap of imagination, Swastika Night posits a
terrifyingly coherent and plausible alternative history. And
considering when it was published, and how little of what we know of
the Nazi regime today was then understood, the novel is eerily
prophetic and perceptive about the nature of Nazism: its violence and
mindlessness; its irrationality and superstition; its emotional
immaturity and cod-mysticism; the mundane, stifling horror; the way it
ultimately dehumanises and destroys everyone, even the powerful; most
importantly, the inextricable link between misogyny, patriarchy and
fascism. A ferocious but subtle and brilliantly controlled "j'accuse"
against misogyny, Swastika Night is one of the few fictions to
emphasise this key element of the Nazis: man, the world-conquering
hero; woman, know thy place.

Like its Orwellian counterpart, this book has the power to send chills
down the spine, so vividly realised is its vision of things that were
to happen and things that might have happened. Indeed, Swastika Night
could almost be seen as a predictive rather than a speculative novel.
Or perhaps a warning, from historic reality and imaginative truth; and
as with Nineteen Eighty-Four, a warning worth heeding in a book worth
reading.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/nov/12/swastika-night-nineteen-eighty-four