Night of brown shadows
Night of the Brown Shadows is a dystopian novel by the English author Katharine Burdekin . The novel was published in 1937 under the title Swastika Night .
action
The novel describes Europe after seven hundred years of National Socialist rule, in which the Jews were annihilated, Christians were extremely discriminated against, a racist male society prevailed and Adolf Hitler was worshiped as a god. In this society, women are completely dehumanized and reduced to giving birth to children. The story was rewritten in the sense of the Aryan ideology . Only elitist circles have knowledge of life before the rule of the National Socialists.
Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire won the "Twenty Years War" (extended World War II ). During this time the Soviet Union was subjugated by Nazi Germany. In addition to the "Hitler Empire" there is the "Japanese Empire". The protagonist is Alfred, an Englishman who is on a pilgrimage to Germany. The English are detested by the Germans because they were the last opponents of Germany in Europe during the "Twenty Years' War". One of his pilgrimage sites, according to the long-established belief, is Hitler's “Holy Airplane”, which Hitler flew on a victorious mission to Moscow . In the Aryan rewritten story, Hitler is portrayed as a tall, blond god who personally won the “Twenty Years War”. When Alfred gets his hands on a historical photo of Hitler showing him with a girl in front of a crowd, he is amazed at what Hitler really looked like. Alfred is shocked that Hitler was actually a short, brunette man with a paunch. The crowd in the picture also seemed to be looking more at the little girl than at him. This did not fit into Alfred's view of the world, which depicts Hitler as God. Another shocking point for Alfred is that women and girls in the picture were valued and respected, quite the opposite of the women of his time who were only used as birthing machines and were discriminated against.
Elsewhere, the Japanese empire dominates North and South America, Asia (up to the border of European Russia), Australia and Persia. Since Japan is the only superpower besides the Hitler Empire and the two factions are constantly waging war, there are always stalemates at the end of the conflict. Furthermore, the two world powers have to suffer badly from the consequences of the physical degeneration of women in order to guarantee the maintenance of the populations. During these events, Alfred is murdered by the SS . Just before he dies, he tells his son the whole truth about the history of Nazi Germany.
The writer Burdekin foresaw both the Holocaust and the attack by Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union and the attack by Japan on the United States .
Reactions
"The book is not only significant in a historical context, as many of its findings have not been formulated more clearly until today, it is also to be viewed as a feminist manifesto in which the consistently male view of literary anti-utopias is originally brushed against the grain." ( Regnier Le Dyckt, Literature Circle Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy 07/2003)
Literary history
The novel is said to have parallels to the novel 1984 by George Orwell , which was also published 12 years later by the publisher Victor Gollancz .
expenditure
- First edition: as Murray Constantine: Swastika Night. Gollancz, 1937.
- Issued as Katharine Burdekin: Swastika Night. The Feminist Press (European Classics), 1985, ISBN 0-935312-56-0 .
- E-Book: Swastika Night. Gateway / Orion, 2016, ISBN 978-1-4732-1467-5 .
- German translation: Night of the brown shadows. Translated by Petra Heßelbarth. Unrast-Roman # 3, Münster 1995, ISBN 3-928300-31-8 (excerpt http://www.unrast-verlag.de/unrast,3,0,367.html ( Memento from September 30, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) , accessed July 24, 2014).