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Crooked Cross describes, through the eyes of one ordinary family, the Nazis’ growth in power between December 1932 and August 1933. It is extraordinarily prescient, anticipating all the horrors they were about to inflict on the world.
The main focus of the novel is on disaffected German youth: it shows with great subtlety that by the early 1930s there was huge unemployment, and a corresponding feeling of futility, and that what the Nazis did so skillfully was to provide a sense of purpose. Crooked Cross is the best account we've read of why some young men who feel disaffected, lost or ignored turn towards authoritarian governments.
The heroine of the novel, Lexa, watches her brothers being seduced by National Socialism, as she observes her Catholic fiancé losing his job because he has a Jewish name and, by the summer of ’33, is deprived of basic human rights like sitting on a park bench. But despite the grimness of all this, the novel remains intensely readable as it implicitly asks the question: how could the country of Beethoven and Goethe, Freud and the Bauhaus, be descending into barbarism? Why would the rest of the world not intervene before it was too late?
Wildly popular when first published in 1934, the novel was turned into a West End play and followed by multiple sequels. But with the outbreak of war, and Sally Carson’s death in 1941, her work was forgotten until it was rediscovered by specialty UK publisher Persephone Books.
Crooked Cross describes, through the eyes of one ordinary family, the Nazis’ growth in power between December 1932 and August 1933. It is extraordinarily prescient, anticipating all the horrors they were about to inflict on the world.
The main focus of the novel is on disaffected German youth: it shows with great subtlety that by the early 1930s there was huge unemployment, and a corresponding feeling of futility, and that what the Nazis did so skillfully was to provide a sense of purpose. Crooked Cross is the best account we've read of why some young men who feel disaffected, lost or ignored turn towards authoritarian governments.
The heroine of the novel, Lexa, watches her brothers being seduced by National Socialism, as she observes her Catholic fiancé losing his job because he has a Jewish name and, by the summer of ’33, is deprived of basic human rights like sitting on a park bench. But despite the grimness of all this, the novel remains intensely readable as it implicitly asks the question: how could the country of Beethoven and Goethe, Freud and the Bauhaus, be descending into barbarism? Why would the rest of the world not intervene before it was too late?
Wildly popular when first published in 1934, the novel was turned into a West End play and followed by multiple sequels. But with the outbreak of war, and Sally Carson’s death in 1941, her work was forgotten until it was rediscovered by specialty UK publisher Persephone Books.