Swastika Night: Nineteen Eighty-Four's lost twin

This week's Berlin Wall ceremonies marked a golden moment in the history of that most benighted of cities. They also reminded us of the incredibly enduring power of Nineteen Eighty-Four: it's almost impossible to write or think about totalitarianism without slipping into that chilling Orwellian lexicon. Big Brother, Newspeak, Thought Police, unperson, Room 101 … Nineteen Eighty-Four has percolated through the culture, language and collective mind with a thoroughness and absoluteness O'Brien would be proud of.

Berlin, of course, is unusual in that it felt both edges of the totalitarian sword: the leftist dictatorship of George Orwell's nightmares, and Nazism. Which prompts a timely question: why are the concepts and characters of Nineteen Eighty-Four so culturally iconic, so deeply embedded, while the equally great Swastika Night is unheralded in the pantheon of classic dystopian novels?

Orwell's book is one of the most famous in the English language, with perennially enormous sales, film adaptations, introductions by Thomas Pynchon. Hardly anybody has ever heard of Katharine Burdekin nor her novel, published under the pseudonym Murray Constantine in 1937. My copy was reissued by the Feminist Press after a hiatus of decades.

And yet in many ways, Swastika Night can be seen as a companion piece to Nineteen Eighty-Four, exploring the other side of the totalitarian coin with equal insight, prescience and humanity. Both were written in the same era; both offer forensic dissections of the psychopathology of power; both are masterful imaginings of a possible future drawn from the dreadful but logical conclusion of these insane ideologies. There are even specific similarities between the two: a hero slowly awakening in consciousness, the cult of political leadership, the rewriting of history, a secret text which reveals the truth, a photograph on which the plot twists. While Nineteen Eighty-Four is perhaps more elegantly written, these books can be considered equals; and in some ways Swastika Night is an even more remarkable artistic and intellectual achievement.

The book takes places seven centuries after the Axis won the second world war (now called the Twenty Year War). Germany now dominates Europe and Africa, Japan everywhere else. "Inferior races" have been wiped out, the few remaining Christians are persecuted. The Nazi realm – a weird, retro-futuristic feudal society – is based on extreme militarism, conformity and patriarchy, and a bizarre quasi-religion based on a divine Hitler, who literally exploded from the head of God the Thunderer. Hitler was seven foot tall with long blond hair, and almost single-handedly won the war.

Also, a sickening misogyny has been given legal force: rape is no longer a crime, and women exist merely to breed the next generation of Teutonic supermen. They are cowed and brutalised, hunchbacked, literally herded together. Muscular boys and men are considered beautiful; women are soft, stupid, disgusting. An Englishman, Alfred, visiting a friend in Germany, meets one of the ruling knights and learns a potentially fatal piece of information: far fewer female babies are being born. For so long told they are non-people, women are now subconsciously breeding themselves – and the Aryan race – out of existence. Thus begins his slow recovery from the disease of hatred and ignorance, and towards a denouement which hints at a more hopeful future.

Though a huge leap of imagination, Swastika Night posits a terrifyingly coherent and plausible alternative history. And considering when it was published, and how little of what we know of the Nazi regime today was then understood, the novel is eerily prophetic and perceptive about the nature of Nazism: its violence and mindlessness; its irrationality and superstition; its emotional immaturity and cod-mysticism; the mundane, stifling horror; the way it ultimately dehumanises and destroys everyone, even the powerful; most importantly, the inextricable link between misogyny, patriarchy and fascism. A ferocious but subtle and brilliantly controlled "j'accuse" against misogyny, Swastika Night is one of the few fictions to emphasise this key element of the Nazis: man, the world-conquering hero; woman, know thy place.

Like its Orwellian counterpart, this book has the power to send chills down the spine, so vividly realised is its vision of things that were to happen and things that might have happened. Indeed, Swastika Night could almost be seen as a predictive rather than a speculative novel. Or perhaps a warning, from historic reality and imaginative truth; and as with Nineteen Eighty-Four, a warning worth heeding in a book worth reading.

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