He was 32 years old, he predicted Nazism with his novel in 1934 and triumphed 90 years later.

It was an idyllic village in the Bavarian Alps. A green carpet in summer, white in winter. Families lived there, more or less happy or more or less unhappy. With their jobs, their loves, their problems. Like anyone else. But it was there that Nazism was inoculated, like a trail of ants suddenly emerging from their nest with no one to stop them. Briton Sally Carson , then 32, observed this phenomenon with perspicacity and wrote about it in a novel , Crooked Cross , which enjoyed some success (and was even turned into a play). What the writer could never have guessed was that 90 years later it would once again be on the UK bestseller list , becoming the real hit of the year and receiving reviews in every media outlet in the country (and the US).

Carson worked as a reader for a publishing house and was also a dance teacher. She had friends in the southern German region of Bavaria and would visit them occasionally. In the early 1930s, when the Nazi party was beginning to gain electoral support, she began to realize its power and how it excited, primarily, the young people she associated with. This is how Crooked Cross (literally, Crooked Cross , since the novel has not been translated into Spanish) came about, a snapshot of the rise of Nazism , published in 1934. Curiously, Leni Riefensthal would film her masterful Triumph of the Will that year, featuring all those images of the Nazi rallies in Nuremberg , and decades later she would say that she hadn't understood anything about what Nazism could become. Others, from a more mundane vantage point, seem to have seen it coming.

A normal (and Nazi) family

Crooked Cross tells the story of the Kluger family with their three children, Helmy, Lexa, and Erich. They live in the small Alpine village of Kranach, a reflection of the real-life Schliersee where Carson used to vacation (curiously, many romantic afternoon movies are filmed there today), and nothing happens, but everything begins to happen. For example, Helmy begins to be dazzled by Hitler's speeches and places a photo of the leader on top of Lexa's piano. The father, Mr. Kluger, who detests the Nazis, however, also begins to realize the intoxicating power they awaken and even remarks: "Don't you know that listening to that guy speak is like believing everything he says for 24 hours?" Because it is her children—mostly them, and not her—who begin to fall prey to the fantasies Hitler promises.

The novel aims precisely, as The Guardian reported, at this “growing disaffection among a group of young Germans who feel lost and ignored , and are turning to a new authoritarian leader.” They are the generation that suffered through World War I, and “the Party offers meaning and purpose, a powerful compensatory force for the lack of prospects that plagued their generation, which had been decimated by the Great War. If Helmy finds in the Party the camaraderie and outlet for his energies that a successful career could have provided, Erich embraces his new identity with a ferocious brutality that repudiates his earlier sense of humiliation,” writes The New Yorker critic. In rural settings, in remote villages, the Nazi Party began to offer a way out… and many young people bought the narrative.

The Party offers meaning and purpose, a powerful countervailing force to the lack of prospects that plagued his generation.

Only Lexa, the daughter, glimpses that something terrible is at work there as well. She notices it when she falls in love with Moritz Weissmann , a doctor who, although Catholic, has a Jewish surname that was already causing her too much trouble in 1933. The writer wrote a passage that she later confessed was true: while Moritz and Lexa are dancing, he suddenly and accidentally bumps into another couple. The boy, who is wearing a swastika, then abruptly turns to Moritz and shouts: "Damn you, you filthy Jew! Get out of our way!" This was already happening before they arrived at the chancellery.

However, in 1933-34 it was still possible to joke about Nazism. In fact, a British character, who could be Carson herself, laughs at the whole kitsch transformation the country was undergoing—for example, the party anthem was even heard in churches—and even comments: “Women must let their hair grow; watches must sing 'Heil Hitler'; dolls in shops must wear brown shirts. Next thing they'll be insisting that children be born with a Hitler mustache already trimmed!” The joke is made while everything is innocuous; after that, it stops being funny.

More real than a report

The novel has been rescued by Persephone Books, a British publishing house that publishes forgotten female authors of the 19th and 20th centuries. And with Carson, whom no one remembered anymore, it has hit the jackpot (even with a gray, clean, minimal cover, without any artifice or photographs) . The writer, sadly, only wrote two more novels, two sequels to this story, The Prisoner (1936) and A Traveler Came (1938), since she died of breast cancer in 1941, at the age of 38, when everything she had told in her novel... had been unleashed with furious consequences.

However, his wit and sagacity remain. Few people observed so closely and at the same time from a distance the rise of Nazism and how it began to infiltrate homes . A contemporary British critic noted that he was “more truthful than telegraphed reports, more accurate than propaganda. And infinitely more interesting than either.”

What would you do if your closest circle, which you love and which is completely normal, began to embrace this type of ideology?

In our current times, Anglo-Saxon criticism has focused on pointing out points that may coincide with our reality (especially what's happening in the US). As The New Yorker notes, "In Crooked Cross , the Nazis are our brothers, our children, our sisters, ourselves . By the end of the novel, even the skeptical Herr Kluger has joined the Party, submitting to a political climate as inevitable as a summer thunderstorm on a deceptively peaceful mountainside, where only a moment ago it seemed as though nothing bad could happen to anyone." The question the magazine asks is: What would you do if your closest circle, the ones you love and who are completely normal, began to embrace this type of ideology ? Because that's what happened in Germany in the 1930s.

Time will tell whether this novel from more than 90 years ago (which could be translated by a Spanish publisher), which told why and how Nazism succeeded, also foreshadows our near future.