Swastika Night by Katharine Burdekin
The 1937 novel Swastika Night depicts a fascist future in which men are in complete power and where women, as we know them, are extinct. In this post-Hitlerian society, males are resentful automatons who are terrified of any emotions and have abolished all forms of history, education, creativity, reading, and art. Women are breeders who are kept as cattle. The “misfit” at the centre of the story wonders, “How could this have happened?”
Swastika Night by Katharine Burdekin
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Although “Murray Constantine” was Katharine Burdekin’s pen name when “Swastika Night” was published in 1937, this wasn’t made public until the early 1980s (Burdekin died in 1963). The main draw of this dystopian book was how Burdekin transformed a medieval Europe that had persisted for seven centuries into a society in which Hitler and the Nazis had completely triumphed. The story opens with a “The faithful chant praise to “God the Thunderer” and “His Son our Holy Adolf Hitler, the Only Man” as they enter “the Holy Hitler church.” Who was instead of being conceived or born by a woman, exploded!” It is difficult to avoid seeing “Swastika Night” as a nightmare depiction of Germany and England that would emerge from a Nazi victory with such a start. It is equally evident that Burdekin is both a condemnation of Hitler’s political and militaristic actions and a warning of the logical ramifications of the Nazi philosophy given the time in which she was writing, two years before Hitler’s forces invaded Poland and formally began the Second World War.
A terrible social world set seven centuries in the future is depicted in “Swastika Night.” The men have a superior position, while the women are, for the most part, submissive and imprisoned in the most appalling conditions. The world is not so much governed by men as by maleness. While Burdekin’s insight is indisputable, my only concerns about this book are that it may spend too much time in static chat between two of the main characters and that Burdekin’s extrapolation appears a little esoteric and not totally realistic. Despite this, the plot is well-written and moves along quickly once the major problems are overcome…
