Swastika Night
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Swastika Night is a futuristic novel published by "Murray Constantine" in 1937 and republished in 1940. Its author's name was a pseudonym for Katharine Burdekin. Swastika Night was a Left Book Club selection in 1940.
The novel is based on Hitler's claims that Nazism would create a "thousand year reich". It is set seven hundred years after Nazism achieved power, by which time Hitler is worshipped as a god. When a character discovers that Hitler was human, he is murdered by the SS. The novel concentrates on the oppression of women, portraying the Nazis as homosexual misogynists. In the world of the novel Christians are marginalized, Jews have been eliminated and women deprived of all rights. They are kept in concentration camps, their sole value residing in their reproductive roles. The Japanese are the only rival superpower to the Nazi-dominated west.
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.
