Customer Reviews

Swastika Night

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Katharine Burdekin's 1937 novel, 'Swastika Night,' is a rare work of science fiction that explores not only the evils of military totalitarianism, but also closely examines the realationship between the sexes. Over 700 years into the Hitlerian era Europe has become a fuedel society where Hitler is God, Christians are persecuted, and women are reduced to the status of animal breeders. A Nazi leader, the Knight von Hess, gives a disillusioned Englishman the greatest of gifts- a book written centuries before that tells the true story of world history and not the Hitler version that Germany accepts as gospel. It's easy to see the many similarities between 'Swastika Night' and George Orwell's '1984.' Both novels take place in a repressive, totalitarian society where a government leader deigns to help a member of the lower class. Also, the themes of massive nation-states in constant competition and degradaded womanhood make one wonder just how much Orwell 'borrowed' from Burdekin. What makes this novel truly amazing, however, is Burdekin's prediction of the horrors to come. She wrote of the comming war with Germany, predicting both the extermination of the Jews and the prolonged, devastating war in Russia. A wonderful work on many levels, 'Swastika Night' is more than just an entertaining novel, it's an important one.

"Swastika Night" was published in 1937, although the fact that "Murray Constantine" was a pseudonym for Katharine Burdekin was not revealed until the early 1980s (Burdekin died in 1963). The chief interest in this dystopian novel was that Burdekin was telling the story of a feudal Europe that existed seven centuries into a world in which Hitler and the Nazi achieved total victory. The novel begins with a "knight" entering "the Holy Hitler chapel," where the faithful all sing the praise of "God the Thunderer" and: "His Son our Holy Adolf Hitler, the Only Man. Who was, not begotten, not born of a woman, but Exploded!" With such a beginning it is hard not to look at "Swastika Night" as a nightmarish version of the Germany and England that would result from a Nazi victory. Given the time in which she was writing, two years before Hitler's forces invaded Poland and officially began the Second World War, it is equally obvious that Burdekin is simultaneously an indictment of Hitler's political and militaristic policies and a warning of the logical consequences of the Nazi ideology.

Burdekin depicts a world that has been divided into the Nazi Empire (Europe and Africa) and the equally militaristic Japanese Empire (Asia, Australia, and the Americas), a demarcation that raises some interesting issues all by itself. Obviously in the Nazi Empire Hitler is venerated as a god and all books and documents from the past have been destroyed so that the Nazi version of history is all that remains (the similarity is more to the efforts of the ancient Egytpian pharoahs than Orwell's idea of the continuous revision of the public record). With all of the Jews having been exterminated at the start of the Nazi era, it is now Christians who are the reviled object of Nazi persecution, as well as those who are "Not Blood." Burdekin's protagonist is an Englishman named Alfred (suggesting parallels to England's legendary king Alfred the Great), who rejects the violence, brutality, and militarism of Nazi ideology because it results not in boys rather than men.

However, the fact that Hitler lost World War II does not mean that "Swastika Night" does not speak to contemporary readers in an important way. After all, we have not been progressing towards the dystopian vision of George Orwell and "Nineteen Eighty-Four" is still the mos widely read dystopian novel around. Burdekin's novel also explores the connection between gender and political power. Part of Hitler's deification is because he was never contaminated by contact with women, and In contrast to the "cult of masculinity," Burdekin depicts a "Reduction of Women" in which all women are kept ignorant and apathetic, their own function being for purposes of breeding. She clearly say the male apotheosis of women as mothers as being the first step on the slippery slope to the degradation of women to mere breeding animals. Despite the obvious comparisons to "Nineteen Eighty-Four," it is the contrast between the womanless world of "Swastika Night" and the woman-centered utopia of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "Herland" (or even Virginia Woolf's "Three Guinesas," published in 1938) that most students of utopian literature are going to want to pursue.

Once World War II began "Swastika Night" became a historical footnote, especially since its pacifism would have been considered an impractical response to Hitler once war was declared. But today the feminist arguments regarding hypertrophied masculinity and the correlating reduction of women that are as much a part of the work as the condemnation of Nazi ideology makes it well worth consideration by contemporary readers.

It was a real surprise to excavate this marvelous book. The book is a chilling future Dystopian vision. All those who have never read the book, and love _Brave New World_ or _1984_ should go for it!!

A fascinating book on many levels. Burdekin wasn't afraid to tackle topics of religion and politics head on. If you like 'We' and '1984', you won't want to put this book down.

I found this book in the bargain bin for a dollar and it was a dollar well spent! I personally just found the setting of this book to be very interesting. It takes place hundreds of years into Hitler's "Thousand Year Reich," which won the war in this alternate world. The entire world is under the dominion of either the German or Japanese empires, who rule feudal male-centered empires. Between the two empires, most of the history has been either forcibly forgotten or grotesquely manipulated to serve the fascist states.

The story takes place in Nazi Europe and mainly involves a British man on pilgrimage, a German serf, and a Nazi Knight. Between the three of them they delve into the lost world of the past and try to create a better future. The characters aren't evenly flushed out but that does serve the atmosphere of the book, that taking away men's(and women's) liberty takes something out of life.

Part of the reason that the book is so powerful is because it was written before the Second World War, when Hitler was still on the rise and there was no guarantee that Fascism would not spread across the world.

All in all it was an interesting read.

First, let me say that this novel is very good and very detailed. While I enjoyed a different style Dystopia in Swastika Night I felt that the writinf wasn't nearly as good as Huxley's. But matching Aldous Huxley's wouldn't be easy and I would not let it ruin this book. This is a fresh new style of Dystopia and I recommend it for everyone to read.

What a wonderfully written book! This world view is extremely well thought out, and I had to keep reminding myself that it was written before World War II broke out. It reads more like an alternate history written after the war, rather than an extrapolation from before the war. While it would be easy to find the subject matter of this book depressing, in the end I was actually left with positive feelings. This is an optimistic message about the resilience of humanity, even in the face of overwhelming odds. Even after being buried and denied for centuries, the Truth survives and continues to find people willing to sacrifice themselves for It.

When I read this book for class, I hated it so much that I wrote a 31-page paper on why Dystopian Fiction is awful. While I also included 1984 and Brave New World into the mix, they were the rare exceptions in which the writers forgot to sacrifice plotting, characterization or tension in order to give their sermons. The sermons were there, but the critics were the main purveyors of the sermonizing. And academic critics (be they deconstructionist, marxist, feminist or just plain stupid) sure do love the tedious little sermons.

I'll spare you the 31-page paper, but just in terms of a book that you might want to read and enjoy - forget it. This book has a few moments of Nicene Creed parody in the first few pages and then it takes a long slow ride into dullsville. The world is horrific but unbelievable. Burdekin doesn't have the imagination to conceive of a Nazi Empire as anything more than a return to the Feudal System complete with women relegated to subhuman status. Everything in this feudal system is static and that betrays an ignorance for what the feudal system was like in the first place.

Worse, the book has no narrative flow. The British Rebel decides that he's not going to believe in Hitler. He meets a knight that tells him the REAL history (history has been altered in the Nazi Empire) and then they talk. And they talk. And they talk and they talk and they talk. No one does anything but talk, and none of it is very interesting. Empires are bad. Women are naturally deferring to men (or is she being ironic) and Hitler may have been a great warrior but not a god (that was a nice little slam on the liberal agnostic apologists for Christianity but it comes too little and too late)

All in all, the natural life of a novel is to go out of print. Since the academic critics can use some novels for their tedious little sermons, some novels stay in print longer than they should. This novel IS a tedious little sermon so the academic critics don't have to work very hard (as they do when they decry Buffy as racist or classist or sexist) so they love it.

But the rest of the world doesn't have to endure the awful thing.