Crooked Cross

Crooked Cross is at its heart a love story, but it is also an extraordinarily prescient account of the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany seen through the eyes of the fictional Kluger family. The only daughter, Lexa Kluger, is engaged to be married to Moritz Weissmann, a young doctor with a bright future ahead of him – or so it seems on Christmas Eve 1932…

Reprinted to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War Two, Crooked Cross is one of the best accounts we’ve read of why some young men who feel disaffected, lost or ignored turn towards authoritarian governments.

"‘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?’"

Crooked Cross was published to critical acclaim in 1934 (“Gripping and moving” - Daily Mirror, “A book everyone should read – and remember” - Coventry Herald) and Sally Carson followed it up with two sequels (The Prisoner and A Traveller Came By) and a play (a dramatised version of Crooked Cross). But in 1938 she married, had three babies in 3 years, and tragically died of breast cancer at the age of just thirty-nine. She was then all but forgotten for decades, as was Crooked Cross – until now.  

Novelist Rachel Joyce recently read Persephone's new edition and wrote to us: 'Crooked Cross is an electrifying masterpiece. It is also my favourite kind of book – unputdownable, beautifully intricate, ambitious and unsentimental. Like the very best, it stays with you long after the last page. I won’t forget it.'

Endpapers

The endpapers for Crooked Cross are taken from a curtain material – machine cord embroidery on a linen background – that's just the sort of thing Frau Kluger might have had hanging in her kitchen. It was manufactured in Germany in 1930 and sold at the Hohenzollern-Kunstgewerbehaus Friedmann & Weber GmbH in Berlin (which was forced to close in 1936) © Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz/May Voigt. 

Picture Caption

'Members of the Hitler Youth' march through Berlin, 1933 © Mary Evans / Sueddeutsche Zeitung.