The Nineteen-Thirties Novel That’s Become a Surprise Hit in the U.K.

The town of Schliersee, about an hour south of Munich in the Bavarian Alps, has long been a favored holiday retreat, both for summertime pursuits on its lake and as a ski resort in winter. There are hiking trails, too, leading up mountains, from which one can see the neighboring territory of Austria, less than ten miles away. When Sally Carson, an English novelist born at the turn of the twentieth century, visited Schliersee in the early nineteen-thirties, she was sensitive to its small-town charms, and drew on them for her characterization of Kranach, the fictional setting for her début novel. The town “basked in the sun,” she wrote. She went on to describe a slope that rose immediately behind a cluster of dwellings, forming a kind of shoulder before the flank of a larger mountain: “There were rough boulders, short paths, and little mountain streams. In every season it had all the qualities of a real mountain without the dangers.”

The ways in which unimagined dangers can lie within the most idyllic of settings is the theme of Carson’s novel, “Crooked Cross,” which she wrote in 1933, with publication following a year later. It concerns the life of an ordinary family—Herr and Frau Kluger and their three adult children, Helmy, Lexa, and Erich—whose house lies on the sunniest, highest ground of Kranach. The opening chapter, set on Christmas Eve, offers a domestic scene as chocolate-box pretty as the town’s topography. The family has just attended a joyful church service, greeting neighbors in the market square before returning home for the thrilling ritual of decking the Christmas tree. “Christmas brought snow and shining nights, unexpected letters, and a party,” Carson writes. The whole house has been decorated with seasonal foliage: “the piano, the writing desk by the windows, the tops of the check curtains, the large photo of Herr Kluger in uniform with the Iron Cross pinned beneath it, the tiled stove and the mantlepiece—everything had to be decorated, even Helmy’s picture of Hitler which stood on the piano when there was room for it among Lexa’s music.” The excessive sweetness of the first few pages is suddenly soured: it is the end of 1932, and over the course of the next year Hitler’s ascent to power will come to dominate the lives of the Klugers, at home and beyond.

Out of print and forgotten for decades, “Crooked Cross” has become a surprise breakout success in the U.K., after having been republished in April, in a handsome edition by Persephone Books, which specializes in neglected works by female authors. The press’s founder, Nicola Beauman, dug up a copy some years ago, when researching British women writers from the nineteen-thirties. “It has been sitting on the Persephone Books shelves ever since, waiting for its moment in the light,” Francesca Bauman, Nicola’s daughter and Persephone’s managing director, told me. “Following the U.S. election last November, we felt that the time had come.” Readers on both sides of the Atlantic are feeling similarly, with word of mouth strong; according to Beauman, one high-school teacher in Texas recently ordered dozens of copies for his class.

The book is, indeed, sufficiently accessible for a high-school student unfamiliar with German history, which Carson provides in brief sketches as her story unfolds. She writes that, toward the end of 1932, the Nazi Party was slowly gaining ground “in outlying places, in mountain villages, in families as yet unawakened to the part they had to play in national life.” Kranach is one such place, and the Klugers are one such family. Herr Kluger, a civil servant, is disdainful of the Nazi Party, but aware of its leader’s charisma: “Don’t you know that to hear that chap speak is to believe everything he says for twenty-four hours?” he asks. To his sons, however, the Party offers meaning and purpose—a powerful countervailing force to the lack of prospects besetting their generation, which had been decimated by the Great War. Helmy, the more sensitive elder brother, has been out of regular work for three years; Erich, the younger brother, has been serving as a ski instructor at a resort hotel and performing as a gigolo to some of the wealthy older women who stay there. If Helmy finds in the Party the kind of fellowship and outlet for his energies that a good career might otherwise have satisfied, Erich embraces his new identity with a snarling brutality that is a repudiation of his former sense of humiliation.

Lexa, their sister, has other concerns: she is engaged to be married to Moritz Weissmann, a clever, accomplished young doctor who works at the Surgical Clinic in Munich, and whose welcome into the family circle seems at first to be assured. But when, in January, 1933, Moritz’s application for a more demanding job coincides with Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, he discovers that—although he considers himself wholly German, and, like his late mother, belongs to the Catholic faith—his Jewish last name, inherited from his professor father, is enough to scotch his career. “In quiet homes like the Klugers it began to be difficult to ignore the political situation,” Carson writes. “The country was like a person tossing in a frightened sleep, half conscious yet half unconscious of the nightmare into which, on awakening, it was to be so abruptly plunged.” Lexa’s own awakening comes at a crowded dance that spring, when she and Moritz accidentally bump into another couple, and Moritz is verbally assailed by a young man with a swastika—a crooked cross—pinned to his coat: “Blast you! . . . you filthy Jew . . . Get out of the way.” Carson later explained that the episode was based on her own experience at a dance in Germany.

In the novel, she grants the perspective of an outsider to Michael Reader, a young Englishman who is visiting Kranach to improve his German before entering the diplomatic service back home. Michael is able to muster mordant humor at the kitsch, cultish transformation of the everyday, as when the chime of the church is switched to the anthem of the Nazi Party: “Women must grow yards of hair; clocks have got to sing ‘Heil Hitler’; dolls in the shops wear brown shirts,” he remarks. “They’ll be insisting next that boy babies are to be born with a Hitler moustache already trimmed!” He, like Carson herself, has a life outside Bavaria, to which he ultimately returns; but, for the residents of Kranach, there is no alternative homeland beyond the one that is rapidly transforming around them according to the will of a figure whom Carson describes as “the little god with a toothbrush moustache.” A young leftist friend of the Krugers is dispatched to Dachau, which, at its establishment, in 1933, was used to imprison political dissidents; his counterparts storm the streets in their brown shirts, hunting down other putative enemies to the regime. As the novel unfolds, Carson follows Lexa’s life at the foot of the mountain, as she is caught between loyalties to her family and to her betrothed, while the spectre of violence creeps closer by the day.

With the book’s rediscovery, Carson is restored to her place among other Anglosphere authors who observed from up close the dawning of the Nazi era, including Kay Boyle, the American writer whose novel “Death of a Man,” published in 1936, was set in the Tyrolian Alps, across the Austrian border from Carson’s fictional Kranach, and Christopher Isherwood, whose “Goodbye to Berlin,” published in 1939, depicted the decadent life of the metropolis immediately before Hitler’s ascent. (In nonfiction accounts, there was Janet Flanner’s three-part Profile of Hitler—“Dictator of a nation devoted to splendid sausages, cigars, beer, and babies, Adolf Hitler is a vegetarian, teetotaler, non-smoker, and celibate” is how it begins—published in this magazine in 1936.) Contemporary reviewers praised “Crooked Cross” for its poignant love story, and for its ripped-from-the-headlines contemporaneity: one newspaper said that the book was “more truthful than telegraphed reports; it is fairer than propaganda. And it is infinitely more interesting than either.” The novel was adapted into a successful play, and Carson followed it with two sequels, before her death from cancer, in 1941, by which time the prescience of her fiction had become appallingly evident. Persephone has plans to publish both.