City of Endless Night

Very interesting review carandol, I'll read this book and add it to my Utopia/Dystopia list too !

I'm totally amazed that I've never heard of this book before. Written in 1920, it's a dystopia which prefigures many of the ideas in more well-known books such as Brave New World and 1984. I'd be very surprised if Huxley and Orwell hadn't read it. The book is set in the 2150s. In the past of this world, the era following the First World War was the Era of the League of Nations, a time when the democracies of the world faced off against the communist dictatorships. But then, in 1986, a resurgent Germany attempted to conquer the world again, and World War Two broke out. This raged on for a long time, but the rest of the world pulled together, and Germany was reduced to a single city, Berlin, an underground city under a thick concrete cap, protected from invasion by an unbeatable ray weapon. This has been so for the last hundred years. The rest of the world is at peace under a World Government, but no-one knows what conditions are like in Berlin.

Our hero, a chemical engineer, manages to get into the underground city, where he is able to pose as a German scientist whom he resembles closely. Through his eyes, we see the "Dark Utopia" of German Imperial Socialism. It is a society which bears many resemblances to Nazi ideology as it came to be -- eugenics, the creation of race of German supermen, the reduction of women to the roles of mother or whore, the ambition to wipe out the "lesser" races of the world, rule by a dictator (in this case a descendant of the Hohenzollerns) supposedly as representative of the people, total war as a way to strengthen the race. Boy are brought up to hate their enemies and show no "weaker" emotions such as pity or love. (Indeed, there's a scene in a school where the boys are encouraged to express their hatred which is reminiscent of a scene in 1984). The viewpoint character works his way up through the ranks of the middle class technocrats, using his knowledge of chemistry from the outside world to amaze the German scientists. He is granted breeding rights (he is expect to choose one woman from three suitable mates chosen by the government), allowed to visit the Level of Free Women (basically a very large brothel), and is eventually elevated to the ranks of Royalty for his good works. Of course, during this time he is finding people who want to overthrow the status quo, and following an ending which owes more to pulp fiction than great literature, it all ends happily.

One thing that has occured to me is that if the traits of German society portrayed here could be extrapolated from the real Germany in 1920, would Germany have ended up with some form of Nazism even without Hitler? This book can't be called great literature, but it's an enjoyable and thought-provoking read and I'm surprised it's not better known in the annals of dystopian fiction