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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/18/crooked-cross-hitler-1933-novel-sally-carson>
"A few days ago I asked an American acquaintance – as one does these days –
where he sees “it”, by which I meant the political situation, heading. He took
a breath. “In my opinion, the US is in a very similar position to Germany in
1933-4,” he said. “And we have to ask, could 1936, 1937, 1938 have been
avoided? That’s the point we are at. You can try to say fascism couldn’t happen
in the US. But I think the jury’s out.”
His words seemed especially resonant to me because I had just finished reading
a remarkable novel precisely to do with Germany in 1933-4, a book written in
the former year and published in the latter. Forgotten for decades, Sally
Carson’s Bavaria-set
Crooked Cross was republished in April by Persephone
Books, which specialises in reviving neglected works. Since then, it has been a
surprise hit, a word-of-mouth jaw-dropper, passed from hand to hand.
Crooked Cross begins in December 1932, and ends at midsummer the following
year. The setting is the little, fictional Bavarian town of Kranach, a
picture-postcard place in the foothills of the Alps. Its focus is the Kluger
family – a modest, middle-class clan of kindly, loving parents and three
grown-up children, Helmy, Lexa and Erich – who are gathering to celebrate
Christmas with their cousins and Lexa’s fiance, Moritz. Everything is warm and
delightful and full of promise: the tree with its glass baubles and candles,
the tissue-wrapped presents, the carols, the roasted goose. Everything is
gorgeously decorated, “even” – one reads with a shudder that is deepened by a
21st-century knowledge of where “it” was all headed – “Helmy’s picture of
Hitler which stood on the piano”.
Carson wrote two sequels to
Crooked Cross. The entire trilogy was published
by 1938. Then, in 1941, not yet 40, she died of cancer. Nicola Beauman, the
founder of Persephone Books, happened upon mention of Carson’s work some years
ago, in an academic book on female writers of the late 19th and early 20th
centuries.
Crooked Cross was well reviewed in 1934, but made no great waves
and soon sank without trace (though the
Manchester Guardian’s founding
women’s page editor, the great journalist Madeline Linford, chose it as a book
of the year). My personal theory is that it was ahead of the curve, sounding
its alarms about the direction Germany was going in before a British public was
ready to hear it. It took some detective work by Persephone Books to discover
who Carson actually was: born in Surrey in 1902 and raised by her widowed
mother in Dorset, she worked as a publisher’s reader. She spent many holidays
with friends in Bavaria, hence her deep knowledge of the region."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
