The Prisoner

First published in 1936, The Prisoner is the much-anticipated sequel to Persephone Books’s recent best-seller, Crooked Cross by Sally Carson.

The Prisoner opens in August 1933, just a few weeks after Crooked Cross ended. Set mostly in Munich, it describes the lives of the Kluger family as Nazism strengthens its grip on Germany: we watch as Erich’s commitment to the Party grows, while Helmy struggles to accepts its strictures threaten to be the family’s undoing. This is a most unusual and unforgettable novel: an English woman, and therefore an outsider, writing about two perfectly ordinary German men who become, or are meant to become, implacable Nazis – as early as 1933.

As one contemporary review put it, 'Sally Carson, who gave us such a vivid picture of Germany inside with her clever book Crooked Cross, has given her readers another wonderful story showing the terrible crisis through which the German nation is passing today in spite of the mad enthusiasm so often displayed... Although presented as a story, the reader cannot get away from the feeling that all the time he is reading the true drama of a great nation which appears to have made a god of its present leader.'

Described on its initial publication as 'a novel of unusual power and poignant interest', ‘a deeply moving story’ and ‘the finest novel on modern Germany’, reading The Prisoner today one can't help but wonder whether, if Sally Carson’s book had had a wider audience at the time, it might have changed the course of history. But alas, it was ‘only’ a woman’s novel.

Endpapers

The endpapers for The Prisoner are from a printed silk and cotton furnishing fabric designed by Weber in 1933 for Hahn & Bach, a furnishing fabric shop at Kaufingerstrasse 14, Munich (which was forced to close in 1938); the fabric was exported to the UK and sold by Gordon Russell. 

Picture Caption

Adolf Wissel (1894-1973), 'Kalenberg Peasant Family', 1939, purchased by Hitler the same year, current whereabouts unknown.