#174 Reign of evil: Swastika Night (1937) by Murray Constantine

Published in 1937, Katharine Burdekin's Swastika Night is a chilling depiction of a far-future fascist dystopia, in which the triumph of Nazism also represents oblivion for humanity and freedom. A precursor to Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), this is an under-recognised and chilling vision of the future which is troublingly relevant today.

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Transcript

The “Hitler wins” scenario is a popular fixture of alternate histories. As the SFE puts it, it has long been an “enjoyable creative exercise” to imagine the dark consequences of an Axis victory in World War II. Swastika Night is something quite different. This deeply bleak novel is set 700 years after Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan have defeated the Allied powers, and sought to annihilate all traces of the past. This extraordinary novel was written long before the war, in 1935 - and then published in 1937. 

Although credited to the pseudonym Murray Constantine, Swastika Night was actually written by Katharine Burdekin (1896 - 1963), a British writer of fiction for children and adults. She was only unmasked as the true author in 1985, over two decades after her death. This chilling novel is not an alternate history, but rather a terrifying vision of a fascist future history, written when Hitler had only been in power for a short time.

Looked back on today, Swastika Night can be seen as a precursor to to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and to the feminist dystopias from later writers like Margaret Atwood, Suzy McKee Charnas, Suzette Haden Elgin, and Joanna Russ. The novel also remains troublingly relevant in an era of resurgent fascism, and still serves as a powerful indictment of that ideology as a vile dead end for culture, freedom, and the human spirit.

The spark

The novel is set in Germany and Britain, seven centuries after the end of the “Twenty Year War”, which can be thought of as an imagined version of World War II. During that conflict, Germany and Japan conclusively defeated the Allied states and divided the world between them. The two Axis powers have been at war intermittently for hundreds of years, with neither able to defeat the other.

Swastika Night has a tight focus, built around just three characters and very heavily weighted towards dialogue - it could be adapted quite neatly to the stage. The main character is Alfred, an Englishman who works as an aircraft engineer. When the novel opens, he is visiting Germany on a religious pilgrimage. The religion in question is “Hitlerism”, a warped cult of personality which reveres the long-dead dictator as a statuesque, blonde, blue-eyed superman.

Alfred reunites with Hermann, a strong but naive and ignorant farm labourer who idolises the Englishman after the two met in England years earlier. Alfred and Hermann meet Friedrich, who serves as a Knight - a kind of warrior-priest of the fascist religion and a government functionary. Friedrich shows Alfred and Hermann two extraordinary items which his family has guarded for generations. One is a book written by an ancestor, and the other is a photograph. These two objects are relics of a past that fascism has almost completely destroyed.

Having learned shattering truths about the past, Alfred and Hermann become custodians tasked with protecting the tiniest, frailest spark of possibility of a better future.

The darkest future

Swastika Night comprises a startlingly dark vision of the future, told in a matter-of-fact way. The world is dominated completely by a supremely evil regime which has almost totally eliminated even the notion of resistance. The novel represents a dire warning about Nazism, and imagines its logical endpoint should it be allowed to grow unchecked. Within this dystopian scenario, Burdekin imagines an incredibly fragile grain of hope. All three of the characters are literally Nazis, steeped in the fascism which is the only worldview they have ever known. They are also the only possibility of change.

Much of the novel is taken up by an extended dialogue in which Friedrich discusses Germany’s social system with Alfred. For the reader, this illuminates the precise nature of this dystopia - for Alfred, it introduces to him the alien idea that things were once very different, centuries ago. Burdekin pays particular attention to the dire status of women, who in this Reich are treated essentially as cattle. Heads shaved, deprived of all possessions and rights, they live in open-air cages and have no social role outside of reproduction. Swastika Night is in part a devastating feminist dystopia, more extreme than many examples published decades later.

In this benighted scenario, all social, technological, and cultural progress has long since come to a halt. Because Nazism forbids any deviation, permits no difference, there can be no productive interaction or cross-pollination of ideas. For this reason, technology remains at a level equivalent to the 1930s, despite the passage of seven centuries. Fascism, Burdekin appears to state, may lionise movement and action, but its inevitable endpoint is instead a deathly stasis. 

One of the most chilling aspects of the novel is the Nazi regime’s broadly successful effort to shrink the range of permissible, or even imaginable, human emotions. Compassion and empathy are virtually extinct in the novel’s scenario. This brings to mind the efforts of today’s extreme right, who are prosecuting their own “war on empathy”. 

Enduring relevance

As a novel, Swastika Night has its flaws. It is uneventful, and based overwhelmingly on dialogue. Its characters are products of their environment, and as a result they all hold and express appalling views. For better or worse, Burdekin rarely shows the elements of her dystopia, but rather has her characters describe and debate them at length. In this way, the novel lacks the directness of later dystopias, from Orwell to Atwood.

The sheer comprehensive terror of Burdekin’s imagined future world has a real power, however, and it is one that is alarmingly relevant for a novel published in 1937. It is grimly fascinating to read Burdkin’s nightmare future, written just as fascism was solidifying power in 1930s Germany. As the extreme right rears its ugly head again, Swastika Night is sadly more relevant now than it has been for some time.