Swastika Night

[rich]

thx for this--been trying to find a copy (along with the Iron Dream)

Hopefully, they are making Magda Goebbels read it in hell





On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 11:08 AM, Dave Monroe
<against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>