• Crooked Cross

2/18/26 (Wed)

A stunningly prescient UK drama from 1935, making its US debut (and its first production anywhere since 1937). The invaluable Mint Theater, which specializes in unearthing forgotten dramas, had made it available for streaming through this weekend, and I happened to read about it just in time. Having coincidentally just watched The City Without Jews from the same era, I find it pretty clear that no one could be ignorant of what was going on in Germany at the time, though there was presumably still a September 10th mentality that left the genocidal murders beyond imagination.

The show is set in Bavaria based on British author Sally Carson’s observations during visits in early 1930s. Her experience led to a novel written in 1934, which she adapted into a play the following year and subsequently to two sequels. The title refers to the swastika.

It is Xmas 1932 and the Nazis are on the rise. A woman and her loving family are celebrating the season, and she is looking forward to her impending marriage to a Catholic doctor with a sterling reputation. Unfortunately, the doctor is facing growing harassment due to his Jewish name, which comes from his father’s side – his religion and lifestyle do not offset his bloodline. He is persecuted to the extent of losing his job at the hospital, having his passport confiscated, and being hounded on the streets. He has had no problem until now either with his fiancée or her family, but she is coming under increasing pressure from them to dump him for her own safety as the situation deteriorates. Her brothers have joined the Nazi party less out of conviction than a sense of pride and belonging, not to mention the steady work. (One was unemployed, the other worked as a ski instructor cum gigolo at a winter resort.) The parents just want to lead a normal life, unwilling to fight back against a regime that will prove as destructive to them as to the minority whose travails they ignore.

Similar to The City Without Jews, the love story is rather conventional, ending as the couple try to escape over the mountains to Vienna in a reverse Sound of Music (it doesn’t go well). But the really gripping part is how the boys slip inexorably and almost unconsciously into the Nazi party and its vicious ideology in a path of least resistance. The father fails to help even though the Jewish doctor had fixed his injured leg at low cost, and even eventually becomes a Nazi himself out of convenience despite significant moral disagreements with the party’s thinking.

In one jaw-dropping exchange, the father and mother ask one son point blank, “Do you want another war?”, only to be told,

“I don’t know what I want. But I’m tired of getting nothing – tired of being useless. And now this has come. I want something. We all want something. We all want to be somebody, we want to have something, we want to make something.”

The sister responds bitterly, “You mean you want to break something. And once you’ve broken everything you can touch, all of you – what do you think you’ll do then?”

The brother later tells her in a fury, “First I’m a good Nazi. Then I’m your brother.” He wants her to marry a dweebish Nazi friend, whose proposal toward the end could save her life. But she has her own convictions. She points out to her gigolo brother that for all his talk of loyalty, he built his career on his clients’ infidelity to their husbands (and hints that the boys must have liked him too, which sets him off).

The drama is uneven, especially with the focus on the love story, and the direction and acting are best left unmentioned. The play has been edited from the original to fit the Mint’s modest budget and stage, but they assure us that every word is by the original author. I wish they had either had the cast speak in a British accent or edited out the British-isms like “beastly” and “shan’t” (not to mention the words “gay” and “queer”, which have very different meanings now and give it a camp feel). It made the play sound artificial. That said, it’s not a particularly good play in the first place and is best seen as an amazingly clear-eyed view of Germany from someone, an outsider, who was there.

The play has inevitably brought out comparisons with the current times, with most reviews seeing some sort of MAGA connection. I’m much more concerned with the left wing and Muslims, who are far more open in their anti-Semitism, often in the guise of anti-Zionism. I find them much scarier, and the parallels with this play are depressing. For those who don’t think it can happen here, this play proves that they didn’t think that back then either. An eye-opening show.