Imagining the Unimaginable

Speculative Fiction and the Holocaust

Glyn Morgan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501350559
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Imagining the Unimaginable examines popular fiction's treatment of the Holocaust in the dystopian and alternate history genres of speculative fiction, analyzing the effectiveness of the genre's major works as a lens through which to view the most prominent historical trauma of the 20th century. It surveys a range of British and American authors, from science fiction pulp to Pulitzer Prize winners, building on scholarship across disciplines, including Holocaust studies, trauma studies, and science fiction studies. The conventional discourse around the Holocaust is one of the unapproachable, unknowable, and the unimaginable. The Holocaust has been compared to an earthquake, another planet, another universe, a void. It has been said to be beyond language, or else have its own incomprehensible language, beyond art, and beyond thought. The 'othering' of the event has spurred the phenomenon of non-realist Holocaust literature, engaging with speculative fiction and its history of the uncanny, the grotesque, and the inhuman. This book examines the most common forms of nonmimetic Holocaust fiction, the dystopia and the alternate history, while firmly positioning these forms within a broader pattern of non-realist engagements with the Holocaust.

1

Precursors and Early Texts: Swastika Night (1937) and the Myth of Silence

The majority of fictional works referenced in this book are modern near-contemporary works; almost all date to after the emergence of so-called Holocaust consciousness in the United States and United Kingdom in the 1960s. While it is these texts and the cultural phenomenon they represent which is the crux of my study, it is important to understand that they did not simply emerge from a text-less void, writing in ways that had never been seen before about things that had never been written about. Just as the Holocaust did not suddenly appear fully-formed as a genocidal novum, instead emerging from a long history of anti-Semitism and as the final development of a system of discrimination and persecution, so too the speculative fiction of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries which engages with the Holocaust emerges from a body of texts which engage with the Second World War and genocide through speculative fiction.

Before the Holocaust was Auschwitz and the extermination camps, before it was gaswagen and mass executions, even before it was Kristallnacht and the discriminatory Nuremberg Laws, the Nazi’s answer to the so-called Jewish Question existed, however partially formed, in doctrine and imagination. The most infamous of the literary expressions of these impulses, and certainly the best known in the English-speaking world before 1939, was Hitler’s own exercise in autobiographical myth-making, Mein Kampf. The future Führer analyses Germany’s mistakes of the past and implicitly and explicitly lays out a plan for the future. The Jews, he writes, are like parasites, adopting the manners and languages of their ‘host’ in order to appear better integrated when in fact they are undermining all that is good for the host nation for their own benefits and in accordance with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.¹ Possibly one of the most dangerous forgeries ever created, Hitler insisted that the very fact that the Jews deny the authenticity of the Protocols is ‘the surest proof they are genuine’.² This is an argument that strikes a worryingly familiar chord in today’s political climate with wide-ranging distrust of sources and testimony, and David Aaronovitch points out that it is an ‘undefeatable’ argument:

The Protocols confirm what I believe and what I see around me, therefore they are true in the most important sense, even if they themselves are forgeries. Furthermore, whether they are forgeries or not does not matter; because they confirm what we see around us, they will help people better understand what is going on.³

Reading Mein Kampf now one may be surprised by how brazenly open Hitler is about many of his views and aspirations. A German reader of Primo Levi wrote to the Holocaust survivor apologizing for Hitler’s influence on his nation by writing that ‘all his beautiful words were falsehood and betrayal we did not understand at the beginning’.⁴ Levi responded:

That dread man was not a traitor, he was a coherent fanatic whose ideas were extremely clear: he never changed them and never concealed them. Those who voted for him certainly voted for his ideas. Nothing is lacking in [Mein Kampf]: the blood and the land, the living space, the Jew as the eternal enemy, the Germans who embody ‘the highest form of humanity on earth’, the other countries openly regarded as the instruments of German domination. These are not ‘beautiful words’; perhaps Hitler also uttered other words, but he never retracted these.⁵

In the context of this book, a modern reader may also be struck by the predictions Hitler makes about the conflict to come and the relationships between Germany and other nations, some of which – such as his assertions that England was the only possible European ally for Germany – read like pages from a strange alternate history:

… the English nation will have to be considered the most valuable ally in the world as long as its leadership and the spirit of its broad masses justify us in expecting that brutality and perseverance which is determined to fight a battle once begun to a victorious end, with every means and without consideration of time and sacrifices ...⁶

Swastika Night (1937), Katharine Burdekin

Of course, the disturbing fact is that Mein Kampf is not a work of fiction and the Hitler who wrote it was not a product of an alternate world like those we will encounter throughout this book but a historical reality whose ideologies ripped apart the fabric of society in Europe and beyond and led to the slaughter of millions of lives.

Knowing this as we do, the views of Hitler in Mein Kampf and of Nazism more generally with regard to women are overshadowed by our knowledge of the importance of the views on politics and race. For some feminists in the 1930s, however, they were worryingly prominent. Published in 1937, two years before hostilities would erupt in Europe, the novel Swastika Night describes a future world carved up between two massive global empires: Imperial Japan and the German Reich. Written by Katharine Burdekin, under the nom-de-plum Murray Constantine, the novel focuses particularly on the role of women in Nazi society. Burdekin envisions a German Empire, 700 years after the conclusion of a twenty-year global war, centred around a feudal society with German ‘Knights’ at the top followed by a larger group of Nazi Germans; this in turn is followed by the servant peoples of the empire such as the British; they are themselves ranked above Christians who live a wild existence in remote areas, and women who have been debased and reduced to an animalistic state. There is, of course, no reference to the Holocaust by name but Germany has ‘killed all the Jews off’ and deified Hitler and persecuted anyone who does not recognize him as an instrument of the Teutonic ‘Thunderer’.⁷

Hitler himself is preserved in popular memory as having ‘colossal height, long thick golden hair, a great manly golden beard spreading over his chest, deep sea-blue eyes, the noble rugged brow – and all the rest’. In short, as an Aryan Superman.⁸ While there are obvious parodi c elements to this description, ones which become relevant to the plot when a photograph of the real Hitler is located, the reinvention of Hitler’s identity is an extension of what Hitler himself was trying to achieve in publishing Mein Kampf, as James J. Barnes explains:

Hitler needed to build a legend, not only about himself, but about the Nazi movement. He had to show the world how he had struggled as a youth against adversity, how he had come through the war creditably, and how he had gradually come to be the leader of a new party. ... In Mein Kampf he would set forth the future directions of a potentially great movement with an appeal to all Germans, and a defiant warning to Germany’s enemies.⁹

All evidence to contradict these legends, and indeed all knowledge and literature that was not approved by the knights centuries earlier, has been destroyed and the evidence of its very existence also expunged from the face of the earth, creating a new Dark Age, the historical/cultural phenomenon from which many of our own myths and legends developed. The sole exception is a photo of Hitler and Eva Braun, and a book of lost knowledge, both passed down through the von Hess line of knights whose distant ancestor wrote the book in remote seclusion while all others were being burnt around the globe. This book connects our version of history with this futuristic yet medieval-feudal society, a society which is otherwise estranged by its ignorance of its own past.

Swastika Night is a development of future war stories in the tradition of George Tomkyn’s The Battle of Dorking (1871), anticipating war with Germany as was increasingly commonplace in the 1930s.¹⁰ However, Burdekin’s novel remains unique among other pre-war predictions due to its vast scale and uncompromising depiction of the implications of Nazi rule imposed over Europe and the world. She posits that the Nazi vision of a ‘Thousand Year Reich’ would be a disaster not just for civilization, or the status of women, but for humanity in its broadest terms. The Germans ‘have made women be what they cannot with all their good will go on being – not for centuries on end – the lowest common denominator, a pure animal – and the race is coming to extinction... women... are not being born’.¹¹ After centuries of being told women are worthless, ‘nothing but birds’ nests’, of being conditioned to believe such an idea to be a divine truth, being encouraged to breed strong male children, less and less girls are being born and the population imbalance is becoming critical.¹²

Burdekin highlights the futility and destructive repercussions of a society which is not only hierarchically class-based, but which also sees gender as a contributory factor towards an individual’s standing within that hierarchy. Daphne Patai remarks that ‘if this is satire, it is also an accurate representation of Nazi ideology and only a slight exaggeration of a masculine gender identity considered normal in many parts of the world’.¹³ This only emphasizes Swastika Night’s importance as Western society grapples with both a resurgent right-wing politics sympathetic to much ideology found in Nazism and an (often related) increasingly toxic culture of masculinity which revels in debasement, degradation and violence towards women.

One of the many startling features of Burdekin’s portrayal of women in Swastika Night is how closely it foreshadows the historical treatment of Holocaust victims. In the novel women have been stripped of all rights and regarded as inhuman or Other. They have been deposed as subjects of love and affection by fervent passion for the Nazi cause and, when pleasures of the flesh are required, by young boys. They have their heads shaved and wear uniform rags, living in women-only compounds under constant guard and surrounded by fences:

To love a woman, to the German mind, would be equal to loving a worm, or a Christian. Women like these. Hairless, with naked shaven scalps, the wretched ill-balance of their feminine forms outlined by their tight bifurcated clothes – that horrible meek bowed way they had of walking and standing, head low, stomach out, buttocks bulging behind – no grace, no beauty, no uprightness, all those were male qualities.¹⁴

This ‘Reduction of Women’ is both physical and spiritual, as the Knight von Hess remarks: ‘Women will always be exactly what men want them to be. They have no will, no character, and no souls.’¹⁵ While Burdekin was writing in reaction to actual and dangerous gender imbalance that she perceived in the Nazi ideology that had risen in Germany, she was also continuing the themes of her previous feminist novel Proud Man (1934). Gavriel D. Rosenfeld suggests that because of her feminist ideology Burdekin fails to expose the true horrors of a Nazi-ruled world, ending the novel on a vaguely optimistic tone which distinguishes the novel from most post-war narratives: her ‘feminist agenda partly explains the oversight’ of placing women and Christians above Jews on the Nazis’ list of sworn enemies.¹⁶ This strikes me as an unfair criticism of the novel given how closely it mirrors many of the dehumanizing tactics employed in the Holocaust, especially as it predates the camps themselves. That Burdekin chooses women as the subject for this dehumanization rather than the Jews does of course serve the point she wants to make about gender roles but, as already noted above, by the time of the novel in c.2650 the Jews had already been extinct for approximately 700 years leaving Christians and women as the most reviled of the surviving population.¹⁷

Women live in ‘a large cage about a mile square at the north end of the town. The women were not allowed to come out of it without special permission, which was very rarely granted. They had a hospital inside it, and their house of corrections, where they were sent if they injured each other or failed in perfect humility.’¹⁸ Again this description is striking when compared to accounts of the Holocaust’s camps:

our Lager is a square of about six hundred yards in length, surrounded by two fences of barbed wire, the inner one carrying a high tension current. It consists of sixty wooden huts, which are called Blocks ... certain Blocks are reserved for specific purposes. First of all, a group of eight, at the extreme end of the camp, form the infirmary and clinic.¹⁹

One critical difference is worth noting, however, in that the camps Burdekin imagines while terrible do not match the brutality of the Holocaust’s, partly because of the unprecedented nature of those specific experiences, but also because the women camps are not extermination camps like Auschwitz, rather they are concentration camps based on an older (notably, British) model, intended for the residence and control of a specific population.²⁰

While the world Swastika Night predicts did not come to pass, the novel remains an important piece of the picture of representation of the Holocaust in speculative fiction. It transcends its contemporaneous environments and continues to remain relevant not as a future war novel but as an alternate history (or more accurately, al...