Crooked Cross, Sally Carson

Crooked Cross, Sally Carson

What a painful read. The year of the events is 1933 and the location is Bavaria, so Hitler has just come to power and you know it cannot end well. The point of reading on is the unfolding of the different ways in which the nightmare of Nazism is to be inflicted on the Crooked Cross’s characters. I several times found it too painful to keep reading and would probably have given up if it wasn’t to be discussed by my book club, to whom I once again owe thanks.

The central character is Alexa, bright, loving and full of life, the darling of her family, the Klugers. She is so deeply in love with Moritz that she is no longer able to envision a future without him. Her family also love him - to start with - for his vitality, wit and charm. But Moritz’s father is Jewish. Though his mother is Catholic and he doesn’t particularly identify as a Jew, you know that the Reich isn’t going to like him. In spite of his great medical skills, he is sacked and cannot get another job

The rest of the family are both attracted and repelled by Nazism and the rise of Hitler. One big draw is the prospect of employment for Alexa’s brothers. During the inter war period in which they came of age, neither had more than occasional, low paid jobs, but they found work with the Party. Unfortunately as the year 1933 wore on, that work was increasingly violent and racist. Carson seems to detect a deliberate destabilising effect in Hitler’s policies, trying to keep the ground shifting under the public’s feet before they could re-orient themselves or stop to think whether this was really the sort of society they had voted for. Parallels with the present American government’s policy of continual reset and reversal spring to mind.

The other attraction of fascism discussed among the Klugers is a perceived sense of humiliation following Germany’s defeat in the First World War. There had been a currency collapse, they felt they had lost the respect of other nations and the future held few prospects for the young. They were willing to accept a certain amount of “rough justice” which of course developed over time till it was all rough and no justice. One of Alexa’s brothers enters enthusiastically into the brutality of the regime, believing that it expresses a vigour preferable to the supine listlessness of pre-Hitler Germany. It’s a platitude of textbooks that resentment over the conditions brought on by defeat in the First War gave rise to the second: Carson fleshes this out in the conversations and reactions of her characters.

This is important because of the great question overhanging the historical, social and political analysis of Nazism which still holds our media in thrall today: how did ordinary, decent people come to accept, then support, then fanatically pursue such hideous wickedness? Carson is an excellent witness here having actually been staying in Germany on close terms with local people. She had seen the hopelessness of those who could not get jobs, who felt their country had little future to offer them, and was unable to fulfil the destiny that Germany’s size and history led them to expect: she had seen how ready they were to pin the blame on minorities rather than on their own militarism under the Kaisers. Her stress on the ordinariness and mutual tenderness of the Klugers, their hospitality, warmth and joy of being alive, makes it all the more poignant and frightening as they first accept and then embrace the false promises of the new regime.

Crooked Cross is a great document from a journalistic point of view. She clearly had a love for what she first found in her stay in Germany: the idyllic scenery and the companionship of kind, friendly people, made the descent into Hitlerism all the more horrible. She wrote urgently, her book was published in 1934. Even though the worst barbarities of the Nazis were still to come – the final solution, the gas chambers, the Anschluss on Austria and invasions of neighbouring countries, the extermination of children who did not fit the Aryan profile, the horrors of the Eastern front, the unleashing of mass destruction upon civilian populations – the first concentration camps were already in place and public punitive violence had become acceptable. 

Carson is prescient: not one Jewish character survives, and it’s still only 1933. She realises far ahead of time just how deep was the abyss that the Germans were preparing for themselves. At the same time she does full justice to the humanity of the Germans she met and was befriended by, leaving us to contemplate the mystery of human evil.

So this is an excellent re-release by Persephone Press of what had been an unjustly neglected novel. Sally Carson died in 1941 aged only 38, leaving a husband and three infant children. The quality of her writing, her compassion and insight, given full expression in Crooked Cross, show us that this was a loss to literature as well as to her young family. I hope that her book will take its place among the stream of Nazi-obsessed volumes and programmes of today – as a warning.

The novel ends when a terrible tragedy, linked to Nazi cruelty, comes to Alexa. Her beloved brother Helmy struggles to break this unbearable news to the family. Their failure to reject, in some their enthusiastic embrace, of fascism, implicates the Klugers themselves in what has befallen them. Completely without preaching or prophesying, Carson foresees that Germany’s new political course is one that can only lead to self-destruction. Carson never lived to see 1945, yet it looms over her work and its tragic end.