蜜芽传媒

Crooked Cross was first published in 1934 and was based on Sally Carson鈥檚 first-hand experience of travelling through Bavaria where she witnessed the inexorable and devastating rise of fascism and antisemitism. Long out of print it was discovered by Persephone Books and republished in 2025.

We are in Bavaria in a small provincial town outside Munich. There, on Christmas Eve of 1932, we first meet the Kluger family, a happy band of Frau and Herr Kluger, and their three grown up children, Helmy, Lexa and Eric. Life is not always easy: jobs are scarce, money is tight; they are living under the shadow of defeat in the Great War. But by 1933 Hitler has won the election and become chancellor and everything is about to change for all of them. None more so than for Moritz Weissmann, Lexa鈥檚 fianc茅, a young Catholic doctor but with a Jewish name, who first and foremost thought of himself as German. But now his country is starting to turn against him.

'Too much power and too sudden power makes men lose all sense of proportion: blood turns such men into madmen.'

Sally Carson鈥檚 novel explores how relationships between family, friends, lovers and neighbours all begin to subtly shift until confidence in the new fascist regime and the hope it offers empowers, gives licence, to many to commit atrocities that would eventually lead to another world war and the Holocaust.

The setting of a very ordinary small town allows Carson to chart how over six months this can happen against the backdrop of catastrophic political upheaval. Carson was only 38 when she died in 1941 of breast cancer, so she never lived to see the end of the war which makes Crooked Cross and her foresight even more extraordinary.

'It doesn鈥檛 seem like propaganda and it makes you feel that grim sense of uncertainty and fear which must come upon any people under a rule of terror.' The Saturday Review August 1934

Sally Carson wrote two sequels both still out of print: The Prisoner published in 1936 and A Traveller Came By published in 1938. But despite the excellent reviews for Crooked Cross (which also enjoyed a successful theatrical adaptation) all three books, and their author disappeared. Until now.

This episode contains antisemitic language and descriptions of violence against and persecution of Jews.

Reader: Scarlett Courtney
Abridged by Sara Davies
Produced by Caroline Raphael
Production Co-ordinator: Henry Tydeman and Nina Semple
Sound by Matt Bainbridge
Recorded at Fitzrovia Studios

Crooked Cross is published by Persephone Books.

A Pier production for 蜜芽传媒 Radio 4

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