Swastika Night is a futuristic novel by British writer Katharine Burdekin, writing under the pseudonym Murray Constantine. First published in 1937 and subsequently as a Left Book Club selection in 1940, the novel depicts a world where Adolf Hitler's claim that Nazism would create a "Thousand Year Reich" is realised. Forgotten for many years, until republication in 1985 in England and the United States,[1] literary historian Andy Croft has described Swastika Night as "the most original of all the many anti-fascist dystopias of the late 1930s."[2]
Set hundreds of years in the future, this dystopia envisions a sterile, dying Nazi Reich in which Jews have long since been eradicated, Christians are marginalised, and Hitler is venerated as a God.[3] A "cult of masculinity" prevails, homosexuality has become the norm, and a "reduction of women" has occurred: deprived of all rights, women are kept in concentration camps, their sole value residing in their reproductive roles.
The novel bears striking similarities to Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, published more than a decade later: the past has been destroyed and history is rewritten, language is distorted, few books exist apart from propaganda, and a secret book is the only witness to the past.[4]
