Had I bothered to do a bit more research, I wouldn’t have read Swastika. But a couple of reviews that lauded its realism and immediacy suckered me in, as did its premise: an American woman travels with her German husband and son to Germany in the summer of 1938 and nearly finds herself trapped in a Nazi nightmare. I also figured that being published by Alfred A. Knopf meant it stood a good chance of being a serious piece of fiction.
Swastika misses that chance, though. It bears all the signs of a book written quickly to capitalize on current events: two-dimensional characters, predictable plot developments, and speeches as cheap substitutes for believable dialogue.
Within the first thirty pages it became obvious where this book was going. Carol Traub, an editor with a glamorous fashion magazine, takes a leave of absence to travel to Germany. Carol’s German husband, Eric, has been living in America for years, but with growing fears about Hitler’s regime and the threat of war, his import business has collapsed. Eric hopes to help his ailing father sell their factory and make enough for a fresh start in the U.S. “Did your husband ever take out his second citizenship papers?” a friend asks Carol. “No-o,” she replies, “He never quite got around to it.”
Cue strings playing a low, ominous chord.
Carol, Eric, and their son Ricky sail off to Bremen, and then board a train to Berlin. Having been out of his country since 1928, Eric is overwhelmed by how great things are going. It’s truly “Springtime for Hitler (and Germany).” He reads to Carol from the Völkischer Beobachter:
They’re certainly forging ahead here. Yesterday, at Fallerleben, Hitler laid the cornerstone of an automobile factory that’s to be the biggest thing in Europe. Covers ground two miles long and a mile wide. Say, that’s something!”
Eric, already prepped by his blonde hair, blue eyes, and sturdy Nordic build, falls even more quickly in thrall with Nazidom when he meets Freda, his father’s young second wife (also blonde, etc.). Freda is an enthusiastic member of various Nazi women’s organizations and exults over “the renaissance of our Germany!” She is also exceptionally welcoming toward Eric. Meanwhile, Carol sees Jude painted in yellow letters three feet high on shops along the streets of Berlin and tries to tell herself, “Those signs are Germany. Not the real Germany.”
Carol has come with a special mission. Her obstetrician, Dr. Gerhardt, has given her money to smuggle to his brother, an intellectual thrown into a concentration camp, in hopes of enabling him to escape. Both Eric and Freda make strenuous efforts to dissuade her, but she persists, enlisting the help of Kenneth, the friend of a friend of a friend and an official with the American embassy. Kenneth turns out not just to be Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, and Reverent, but also devastatingly handsome, single, and just about Carol’s age.
Aside from the specifics of the plot development, you know where this is all going. Freda the Nazi witch, plus great shovelfuls of Nazi propaganda, lure Eric over to the dark side. Carol and Kenneth, the trusty scouts, do their best to render aid to those in need, even after learning that Dr. Gerhardt’s brother is already dead. Without an American passport, Eric learns he cannot leave Germany after the Sudetenland crisis leads Hitler to put all German men on mobilization alert. He decides to remain, to join the Nazi Party — and to marry Freda as soon as they can dump their respective spouses.
What will happen, dear reader? Will Carol be trapped in Germany, perhaps even tossed into a concentration camp herself? Will Eric don the black uniform of the Schutzstaffel? Will little Rickey wind up in the Hitler Youth?
Seriously, folks, do think any of that could happen? No, Carol and Ricky will get back to the good ol’ U.S.A., where Kenneth is destined to join them, and those Nazi no-goodniks will get their comeuppance by page 238. Schisgall even saves till page 235 a nasty twist that destroys all Eric’s dreams of Aryan supremacy. (Can you guess what it is, dear reader?) As The New Yorker’s brief notice put it, “Mr. Schisgall lays it on pretty thick.”
Swastika is remembered today as the basis of the 1940 film, The Man I Married, starring Joan Bennett as Carol and Francis Lederer (himself a Jewish-Czech emigre) as Eric. The Man I Married was also distributed under the title I Married a Nazi — which, it turns out, was how the novel was originally serialized in Liberty magazine in the spring of 1939.
That serialization explains a lot about the two-dimensional nature of Swastika. The rest can probably be attributed to an achievement noted in Oscar Schisgall’s New York Times obituary: “Mr. Schisgall wrote some 4,000 short stories and articles [!] for the Reader’s Digest, the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Liberty and The New York Times Magazine, among others.” A bit of searching reveals that around the same time that I Married a Nazi was running in Liberty, Schisgall also published “The Gun Wizard” (“A Story of Gunsmoke Justice”) for Western Stories and “Power Dive” (“An Exciting Short Story of South American Skies”) for Air Stories. And within weeks of Nazi winding up, another Schisgall serial, “World’s Fair Girl,” began running in Liberty. Schisgall was literature’s equivalent of a short-order cook — though his hash-slinging probably paid a nice mortgage and put a kid or two through college.
Swastika is notable today primarily as an artifact of the popular American magazine serial of the 1920s and 1930s, designed to provide an entertaining half-hour (or, in the case of Part One of I Married a Nazi, 25 minutes and 18 seconds) after a day of work — and to encourage purchase of the magazine’s next issue. It also demonstrates the growing representation of Nazism as a form of organized madness, an evil force fundamentally at odds with American values.
As such, it should not be dismissed as mere propaganda as stilted and simplistic as that spewed forth by the like of Goebbels and Julius Streicher. The American edition of the Völkischer Beobachter, devoted a lengthy denunciation of “another one of those barbed serials against the wild and despicable Nazis,” written by “the industrious and avaricious wholesale writer Oscar Schisgall.” It’s a classic example of how to make your opponent’s case in an ill-thought attempt to destroy it:
Mr. Schisgall chose as the locale for his creation a rather decent young American family — a mother, a little son, and a father. The husband is German and his name is Eric, and he still has not taken out his “second papers.” Special circumstances cause our little family to visit the homeland of our hero — Germany. Well, up to now everything is in the best order. But once he arrives at home, the whole picture changes. Mr. Eric, who up to now was well mannered and quite civilized, turns within one second into a rabid Nazi of the worst sort. And the things he does now, as a Nazi, actually make every humanitarian heart beat in waves of indignation.
And our Mr. Schisgall has written this Nazi drama quite fascinatingly. One can hardly wait for the next installment…. But oh, what a shock! When our dear Mr. Eric wants to divorce his faithful wife in order to marry the pretty wife of his father, his father is forced to admit that he is non-Aryan. Readers of the serial heaved a big sigh of relief when they read the final installment, because this final article showed that Mr. Eric did not act so disgustingly because he had become a Nazi but because he had a Jewish mother. The immediate change of attitude, the egotism, the brutality, the cowardice, the lying—all those characteristics of Eric are the typical characteristics of the race of Erie’s mother….
Anyway, we ought to thank Mr. Schisgall for his understanding of the real problem.
A Jew born in the Pale of Settlement in 1901, Schisgall had emigrated to the United States as a six-year-old (undoubtedly sailing on a Red Star liner, as several sources list the port of Antwerp as his birthplace). Schisgall did travel to Germany as an adult, but his visit pre-dated the rise of the Nazis, so aside from references to places around Berlin, most of his descriptions of Germany and Nazi activities in mid-1938 came from newspapers, magazines, and second-hand accounts. But for one of his formulaic productions to succeed so well in putting a burr under the Nazi saddle as to earn a formal condemnation in a party newspaper must have provided a special satisfaction.
The more I read this the more confused I got … I thought “Wait, didn’t I read I married a Nazi back in college? But it wasn’t Swastika” … and all this melodrama …
But a quick check of the library’s catalog tells me it was I Married a German! Published in 1938, not a novel. To clip the contemporary review from the journal International Affairs:
72. I Married A German. By Madeleine Kent. 1938. (London : Allen and Unwin. 8vo. 349 pp. 12s. 6d.)
The period covered by Madeleine Kent’s married life in Germany began in 1931, and ended with her recent return to this country : it thus covers the Nazi Machtergreifung and the firm establishment of that power. On the face of it her book records the reactions of a very intelligent and fair-minded observer to that astonishing regime. The implications go further.
Miss Kent belongs to that comfortable and educated section of the middle classes to which this country has been indebted for so many eminent people. It is a class which has no counterpart in Germany, a country too poor to afford it. Hence a fundamental incomprehension for the rougher way of life which facts have imposed on Germany?the tighter organisation, the more rigid discipline, and the harder way of existence.
The really urgent question which a reading of Miss Kent’s book poses is this : does this harder living and generally more primitive way of existing in Germany account for those qualities which disgust one in Nazi Germany?the brutality, the absolute will to break an opponent (qualities equally evident, it may be added, in Wilhelmian Germany) : or is that those qualities are the result of heredity, and not of environment, and will survive any growth of riches and comfort within the country?
Thanks for mentioning this and quoting the review. If nothing else, it’s a reminder of the time when reviewers felt free to make sweeping and utterly incorrect assertions like “It [middle class] is a class which has no counterpart in Germany, a country too poor to afford it.”