I was poking around in John Carey’s Bumper Book of Utopias for something about Iambulus’ Islands of the Sun. I didn’t find anything (an online search revealed this), but it reminded me just how cross his introduction to Katharine Burdekin‘s Swastika Night makes me.
Swastika Night (pubd. 1937) is set in a far future where the Thousand Year Reich has become a reality. History has been rewritten, Hitler is worshipped as a God, the Jews have been exterminated, and women have been reduced to animal status, kept in compounds for breeding purposes only. It is a shocking and powerful examination of the links between misogyny, gender polarization, militarism, and totalitarianism. It anticipates the concerns of second wave feminist books like Walk to the End of the World by Suzy McKee Charnas (not to mention anticipating the structure and themes of Nineteen Eighty-Four, published 10 years later).
Carey’s criticism is that it must have contributed to the “panic and misinformation” of the pre-war period, and boils down to this: “In fact Nazi ideology encouraged the health and welfare of women, provided they were racially ‘pure’. Maternity benefits and other measures to promote the well-being of mother and child were introduced [...] Goebbels [...] stressed that though Nationalist Socialist movement was in its nature masculine, it looked to women [...] to give life its fullness [p. 412].”
Really, of all the criticisms that can be levelled against Swastika Night (e.g. that like many didactic novels – including Burdekin’s own The End of This Day’s Business and, yes, Nineteen Eighty-Four – there is page upon page of polemic), equating Kinder, Küche, Kirche with a progressive stance on women’s rights has to one of the most banal.
A more interesting criticism is made in this review:
“[...] a major flaw in SWASTIKA NIGHT [is that] it is violently anti-homosexual. All the Nazis are misogynists, most of them are gay, and many of them prefer little boys – not just pederasts but paedophiles. Burdekin’s sophistication did not stop her using homosexuality as an automatic disqualification from humanity. She used an ultimate cliche‚ to prove the villainy of the Nazis [...] although [...] gender played no part in going to the gas chambers. (While sexual orientation definitely did).”
I would beg to differ from this interpretation, although I sympathize with the reading. Burdekin’s point, to me, seems to be about the twisting of love to the instrumental purposes of collective ideology and how, to this end, even ideology itself will ultimately be sacrificed. There is indeed love in Swastika Night, love which transcends and ultimately promises the defeat of ideology: this is the unselfish devotion of Hermann to his lover Alfred, which in turn translates into a tentative act of pity on Alfred’s part to his long-term partner in the breeding cages, and the nascent love he has for the child they have together. Burdekin’s examination of the instrumental uses to which love can be put does not make her homophobic, in the same way that her examination of the debasement of women under patriarchal militarism does not make her either misogynist or misandrist. Love between persons, not love directed by the state – and any love, for God’s sake, she seems to say – this is our only hope.
