In June​ 1934, Richmal Crompton published ‘William and the Nasties’ in the Happy Magazine, an interwar journal that provided readers with a cheerful stream of popular fiction. In this story, William Brown, 11-year-old leader of the Outlaws, decides to become a Nazi. Despite his interest in ‘rightin’ people’s wrongs’, he has been impressed by his friend Henry’s account of ‘the Nasties’ in Germany:

‘They can’t be called nasties,’ said William. ‘No one would call themselves a name like that. That mus’ be what people call them that don’t like them.’

‘No, it’s their real name,’ persisted Henry. ‘They really are called nasties. Nasty means something quite different in Germany.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ said William. ‘Nasty couldn’t mean anything but nasty anywhere. What do they do?’

‘They rule all the country,’ said Henry, ‘an’ make everyone do jus’ what they like an’ send them to prison if they don’t.’

Henry explains that the Nasties specialise in targeting Jews: ‘Jews are rich … so they chase ’em out and take all the stuff they leave behind. It’s a jolly good idea.’ Remembering that Mr Isaacs, the new owner of the local sweetshop, is Jewish, the boys plan a raid. In their view, Mr Isaacs is mean with his measures and thoroughly deserves this treatment. William, appointing himself leader of the Nasties, rejects the feminine associations of Herr Hitler, preferring to call himself Him Hitler (‘I’m jolly well not going to call myself her anything’).

Their enthusiasm falters as evening falls and they approach the shop. Crompton makes clear that their underlying decency is reasserting itself: ‘It – it does seem a bit like ordin’ry stealin’,’ Ginger says. On entering they find themselves interrupting a burglary and turn their attention to rescuing the sweetshop owner from the thief. Their fascist aspirations forgotten, the Outlaws become the warmest of friends with Mr Isaacs, who rewards them with liquorice allsorts, buttered almonds and bull’s eyes.

‘William and the Nasties’ was among the stories collected in William – the Detective (1935). By the time it was removed, somewhat belatedly, from new editions of the book in 1986, countless children had learned about William Brown’s flirtation with fascism. I was a keen consumer of William’s adventures in my first years as a reader, and though my ignorance of European history was fathomless, I had the vague sense that ‘William and the Nasties’ was describing something other than the inventive mischief that delighted me in Crompton’s other stories. One thing I did know was that the Nazis had been responsible for the Second World War, and that they were a very bad lot. What could have led William to become a Nazi, however briefly?

‘William and the Nasties’ is a clumsy attempt to satirise the rise of Nazism. Greedy self-interest is what motivates the Outlaws, together with the belief that the law will be on their side. According to William, ‘It’s not stealin’ when you’re nasties. It’s by lor if you’re nasties.’ Even I could see that this wouldn’t do. Crompton’s story was ill-judged in tone and marred by the characterisation of Mr Isaacs as a ‘small hook-nosed man’, ungenerous in his financial dealings. But the story was making a stab at a serious point, at a time when the advance of fascism in Europe had yet to make much impression on most British people.

Continental writers had a more grounded knowledge of what fascism meant. Lion Feuchtwanger’s The Oppermanns (published in Amsterdam in 1933 and soon translated into English) traces the ruin of a middle-class German Jewish family who run a chain of furniture shops. Feuchtwanger, a successful novelist and playwright who had worked with Bertolt Brecht, was an early and outspoken critic of Hitler. The Oppermanns was originally intended as a film collaboration with the British screenwriter Sidney Gilliat. The project had been commissioned by Ramsay MacDonald, who was disturbed by the rise of Nazism, but the government’s support was withdrawn after Hitler tightened his grip on Germany in 1933 and MacDonald retreated into a policy of appeasement. Feuchtwanger, who had been forced out of Germany and was living in the South of France, converted the idea into a weighty novel, and his celebrity ensured a substantial readership. More than 250,000 copies were sold worldwide.

The warning delivered in The Oppermanns is qualified by its uncertain perspective, which wavers between defiance and a more pragmatic advocation of compromise or flight. (Feuchtwanger, after some months in a French internment camp, escaped to America in 1940, and lived in California for the rest of his life.) Writing in the early 1930s, he couldn’t have predicted the scale of calamities to come. Was the unshakeably decent behaviour of Gustav Oppermann, the moral centre of the novel, an exercise in futility? Klaus Frischlin, Gustav’s secretary, whispers in his dying employer’s ear: ‘They will not crush us … neither us, nor our children, nor the Socialists, nor the Jews, nor the spirit of reason. They will never succeed in crushing us.’ That conclusion wouldn’t have come easily to any Jewish novelist writing in 1945.

Feuchtwanger was one of the first authors to articulate the dangers of fascism. Others followed in increasing numbers later in the 1930s, when the threat of war had become only too apparent. George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia was published in 1938, as was Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas. Woolf’s essay makes a connection between anti-fascism and women’s struggle for freedom:

The daughters of educated men who were called, to their resentment, ‘feminists’ were in fact the advance guard of your own movement. They were fighting the same enemy that you are fighting and for the same reasons. They were fighting the tyranny of the patriarchal state as you are fighting the tyranny of the Fascist state … The whole iniquity of dictatorship, whether in Oxford or Cambridge, in Whitehall or Downing Street, against Jews or against women, in England, or in Germany, in Italy or in Spain is now apparent to you. But now we are fighting together.

Many of the writers who chose to sound the alarm through fiction rather than polemical essays were women whose books endorse Woolf’s argument. William Brown knows that his new life as a dictator cannot be tainted by any suggestion of femininity. Katharine Burdekin’s dystopia Swastika Night (1937) anticipates a ‘cult of masculinity’ arising from the triumph of Nazism. Both Phyllis Bottome’s family saga The Mortal Storm (1938) and Djuna Barnes’s provocatively gay Nightwood (1936) are formed by gendered perspectives. Kay Boyle’s Death of a Man, also published in 1936, describes the simultaneous undoing of Pendennis, a spirited American woman in flight from her oppressive father, and Prochaska, her Austrian lover, who has been seduced by Nazism. Boyle, an American who had lived in the Tyrolean Alps in the mid-1930s, identifies the origins of Austrian fascism in the resentment of the impoverished middle classes. But gender has a central part to play. Prochaska feels himself to be unmanned by the privation and defeat of his countrymen, and his politics are an attempt at masculine self-assertion – ‘all his life he had been fearful of becoming as soft as other men were.’ Boyle, influenced by Woolf and D.H. Lawrence, focuses on the destructive relations between Pendennis and Prochaska, to the extent that some of the first readers of the novel suspected she was sympathetic to Prochaska’s infatuation with Nazism. But Boyle wants her readers to perceive that his conversion to popular nationalism rests on a fantasy of manhood. She is describing the death of a man, not his apotheosis.

Other novels make more fleeting political statements. P.G. Wodehouse, who had moved to France in 1934, and maintained a cautious distance from anything that could be identified as a political direction for his fiction (if not his radio broadcasts), didn’t entirely insulate himself from the concerns of the late 1930s. In The Code of the Woosters (1938), Roderick Spode, the risible leader of the Black Shorts (so-called ‘Saviours of Britain’), is clearly based on Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts. Spode’s thuggish persona is damaged when Jeeves discovers that the source of his income is designing ladies’ underwear (gender again). Wodehouse allows Bertie Wooster a moment of something close to a political identity as he confronts Spode’s aggression:

It is about time … that some public-spirited person came along and told you where you got off. The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you’re someone. You hear them shouting, ‘Heil, Spode!’ and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: ‘Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?’

This abrupt change in mood doesn’t last, but Wooster’s incongruous outburst briefly disrupts the sunlit artifice of Wodehouse’s world with a suggestion of something darker.

Stevie Smith’s Over the Frontier, also published in 1938, represents a different kind of fantasy. Smith’s writing is never conventional, but this novel is among her oddest publications. Pompey Casmilus, who is still entangled in the unhappy affair that began in Smith’s first novel, Novel on Yellow Paper (1936), has escaped to Germany and finds herself in the unlikely role of soldier and spy. She is both repelled and energised by her transformation: ‘I do not like to be in uniform, to prance around and be a soldierly female, I have a sort of horror of that sort of female.’ It’s hard to know how to take Smith’s description of Pompey’s implausible exploits, which often seem to be a luridly extended dream rather than political satire. But the novel’s conclusion allows no room for ambiguity in its vision of the world that has consumed Pompey, immersing her in the brutality of war. ‘Power and cruelty are the strength of our life, and in its weakness only is there the sweetness of love.’

Anna Gmeyner, a Jewish playwright born in Austria, balanced realism with lyricism in her depiction of Europe’s corruption. Gmeyner’s affluent parents had moved in Sigmund Freud’s circle, and after moving to Berlin she had, like Feuchtwanger, worked with Brecht, and written screenplays for G.W. Pabst. Escaping from persecution in Germany, she went to Russia and collaborated on an unfinished film with Eisenstein. She moved to London in 1935. Manja: A Novel about Five Children was first published in Amsterdam in 1938 under a pseudonym, and a well-reviewed English translation (titled The Wall) appeared the following year. The story describes the fate of divided social groups in the period between 1920 and 1933, all contending with the bitter aftermath of the First World War. The five children were born in 1920, and their families embody the fractures within the Weimar Republic. Heini is born to liberal parents who are reluctant to acknowledge the slow defeat of their progressive values; Franz’s parents find their declining fortunes much improved by becoming Nazis; Harry’s prosperous family has Jewish antecedents, a fact which they mistakenly believe will cause them no difficulties; Karl’s father is a committed and active communist. Manja, the Jewish girl at the centre of the bond between the children, is the daughter of an impoverished single mother from Poland. The children meet regularly in the shelter of a wall where they discuss their shared plans and daydreams. But as they approach adolescence, political circumstances become impossible to ignore, and their futures are directed by what happens to their families Manja is a child of preternatural virtue, and her goodness undermines Gmeyner’s project. The awkward fusion of fable with realism makes it too easy for readers to distance themselves from the novel’s urgency.

Sally Carson’s Crooked Cross (1934) was among the earlier responses to the menace of fascism, and the novel anticipates many of the preoccupations of Manja. Like Gmeyner, Carson insists that recognising the subjugation of women within the family is essential to any analysis of fascist ideologies. But her book doesn’t share the febrile quality that characterises Gmeyner’s writing. Crooked Cross follows the Klugers, an unexceptional German family living in the fictional town of Kranach, as they come together for Christmas in 1932. Kranach is modelled on Schliersee, a small town near Germany’s border with Austria. Carson knew it well. The Klugers are a part of this community, but it soon becomes clear that economic pressures are destabilising their apparently settled lives. Herr Kluger’s salary as a post office official has been reduced, and Rosa, his resourceful wife, is struggling to manage the household budget. Helmy, the eldest son, is embittered by his failure to find any kind of work, while his younger brother, Erich, depends on a part-time job as a ski instructor and is humiliated by the expectation that he will supplement his income by providing sexual services for the rich women he is teaching. Only Lexa, the daughter of the family, is confident of a secure future. She is engaged to a gifted young surgeon, Moritz Weissmann. But Moritz, though he thinks of himself as entirely German and has followed his German mother into the Catholic Church, has a Jewish father and a Jewish name. The reader begins to guess what is in store for these largely likeable characters.

The Kluger men turn to the Nazi Party for their salvation. Erich becomes a brown-shirted stormtrooper, relishing the violence of his new role, while Helmy finds purpose as a party secretary. The women of the family are dismayed:

‘Do you want another war, Helmy?’ asked Frau Kluger quietly, keeping her eyes on the bread she was cutting …

‘I don’t know,’ he answered miserably. ‘I don’t know what I want. I want something – we all want something – we all want to be somebody, want to have something – make something.’

‘You mean you all want to break something,’ broke in Lexa sharply. ‘And when you’ve broken everything you can touch – what d’you think you’ll do then?’

Carson recounts the relentless succession of events that leads to the disintegration of the family. The novel’s timeframe extends over six months, from Christmas Eve 1932 to midsummer 1933. Hitler is appointed chancellor in January; the Reichstag fire in February leads to the proclamation of a national emergency; Dachau concentration camp for political prisoners opens in March; Jews are excluded from public office in April; trade unions are banned and books are burned in May. Step by step, Germany is transformed. Carson spares her readers no detail of the disaster as it evolves. But her impulse to account for the Klugers’ commitment to the Nazis does not waver. Helmy isn’t a monster, though his actions have monstrous consequences. More deeply affected by a consciousness of failure and futility than his brother, he is led by misplaced loyalty. He does his best to separate his sister from Moritz, without fully grasping what is at stake. ‘It was hard to have to treat your friends like this,’ he tells himself. ‘But Jews were Jews. And you had to do what Hitler said, that was your duty now.’ The Kluger men are culpably naive in their response to what they perceive as dispossession and injustice, and Carson repeatedly underscores Helmy’s lack of ‘moral courage’, juxtaposing his prevarications with Lexa’s strength. But Helmy doesn’t quite lose his humanity, and he is finally made to face the cost of his choices.

Sally Carson​ , born in 1902, was the youngest of three sisters, and spent her childhood in Dorset. It was a conventional middle-class English upbringing, unusual only in the lack of a father’s presence (he died when Carson was four years old). Like Stevie Smith, Carson grew up in ‘a house of female habitation’ and seems never to have doubted her right to creative independence. She worked as a publisher’s reader and a dance teacher in London, and began to write fiction as a young woman. She had friends in Bavaria, and her holidays there gave her a keen interest in the region (‘from the first time of seeing Bavaria you loved it’). In describing the spread of Nazism, which was slower to reach the conservative southern regions of Germany than the cities of the north, she was writing as both insider and outsider. Crooked Cross was the first in what became a trilogy, followed by The Prisoner (1936) and A Traveller Came By (1938). The modest success of the novel led to a dramatised version by Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1935. The play was popular, its profile perhaps enhanced by the controversy it generated. Some saw the story as anti-German propaganda, and the Lord Chamberlain’s office, adhering to the government’s policy of appeasement, stipulated that every ‘Heil Hitler’ should be removed from the script.

Carson must have been gratified by the play’s positive reviews. But then professional misfortune struck with the appearance of Bottome’s The Mortal Storm shortly after the play’s London launch. Unlike Carson, Bottome had an established reputation as a novelist, and her book, which tells a story closely resembling the narrative of Crooked Cross, became a bestseller. In 1940 it was made into a Hollywood film starring James Stewart. Crooked Cross was eclipsed. Perhaps professional disappointment was softened by personal fulfilment, for in 1938 Carson married Eric Humphries, a publisher whose father had established Lund Humphries, and they had three children. She died of cancer in 1941, and her work disappeared from public view.

Crooked Cross has been reissued by Persephone Books, a press dedicated to reprinting neglected works of fiction and non-fiction, mostly by women, from the mid-20th century. Persephone has also made The Oppermanns and Manja available in handsome new editions, and is reissuing The Prisoner later this month. Carson’s dissection of the question that has disturbed the European mind for decades – how did it happen? – has touched a contemporary nerve, and the new edition of Crooked Cross has met with unexpected success. The novel is driven by a steady building of cold dread, as the reader is led to appreciate the extent to which life in Kranach has been corroded by hatred and fear. Lexa realises what she is up against when she and Moritz accidentally collide with another couple at a dance. ‘Blast you! … you filthy Jew … Get out of the way.’ It was based on an incident Carson herself had witnessed. Michael, a sardonic English observer who visits Kranach and tries to win Lexa from Moritz, represents a different and more detached viewpoint. He sees Hitler as an absurdity: ‘They’ll be insisting next that boy babies are to be born with a Hitler moustache already trimmed!’ Carson wasn’t writing with the involved intensity of authors whose lives had been threatened, or irreparably damaged, by fascism. Like Michael, she is watching from a place of safety, conscious that her own position is protected by her British passport. But she knows that the Nazis are more than a joke.

Nicola Beauman, who founded Persephone Books in 1999, came across a copy of Crooked Cross years ago, and reserved the book for reissue when the right moment arrived. Francesca Beauman, Nicola’s daughter and now managing director of the press, has said that the American election in November 2024 served as the trigger for its appearance. The analogies are obvious, but Francesca Beauman doesn’t claim that the book will make a difference. Introducing the novel on Persephone’s blog, she asks: ‘Will the novel be read by anyone who has the power to improve/change things for the better? It is not very likely – and so it will become another in the long line of novels that tried to be influential/make people wake up … but failed because of the listlessness of politicians.’ She is not entirely wrong, but the listlessness of politicians isn’t the only issue here. Leaders of liberal Western nations face a tide of difficulties, from structural economic weakness and ever-rising welfare costs to climate change and the disorder arising from international conflict. If they are listless, their lethargy is a product of impotence. Meanwhile, the new populism continues to gain ground, touting its shop-soiled illusions of a return to national greatness.