Communism Usurping Fascism: Political Propaganda in Jean Devanny’s <em>Roll Back the Night</em> and Dymphna Cusack’s <em>Heat Wave in Berlin</em>

Abstract

This essay explores two specific literary and thematic tropes apparent in Jean Devanny's Roll Back the Night (1945) and Dymphna Cusack's Heat Wave in Berlin (1961): first; depictions of the fascist victim and perpetrator that act as means of didacticism and political pontification in an Australian context; second, each author's belief that the threat of fascism would engulf Australian and/or European politics post-Second World War. While the publication of the two texts is separated by almost two decades, I argue that their similarities highlight an Australian cultural naivety promoted by geographic and socially removed Australian understanding of the Third Reich. This cultural specificity becomes apparent in Roll Back the Night and Heat Wave in Berlin through the texts' depictions of the Nazi period and the period's ensuing after-effects, drawing one-dimensional character representations of the communist victim and fascist perpetrator that serve not as means of remembrance or understanding but as Communist propaganda aimed at an Australian audience. Similarly, the cultural and geographic distancing in the two texts is further noted-however influential these stories may or may not have been-in each author's attempts to combat what they suggest is the encroaching threat of the political Right in both Australian and European contexts. It is this lack of character development, alongside each author's political tone and their similar political concerns, that will be explored in this essay.Jean Devanny and Dymphna Cusack were both, for many years, affiliated to the Realist Writers' League, collective that contained a significant minority of Australian writers [in which] the Communist Party provided an intellectual context for the production of literature at the time (Nile 189). A significant portion of their fiction, including Roll Back the Night and Heat Wave in Berlin, attempts to adhere to socialist realism prescriptions, which, as the Australian literary scholar Susan McKernan notes, can be categorized as having four goals:First, socialist realism aimed to be popular both in the sense of representing the lives and aspirations of working people and in the sense of being accessible to and entertaining for them. Second, it linked nationalism to universal concern with the struggles of humanity. Third, it presented the actual conditions of contemporary society rather than the trials of the past as the material for literature. Most important, socialist realism offered reconciliation of the two strands of literature, the concern for the life of the individual and the concern for society, by means of the theory of the typical. (31)Whether Devanny's or Cusack's writing succeeded in fulfilling all of these goals is doubtful, for these demands were to meet (McKernan 31). The intention to abide by such rules, however, exerted significant influence on the content of each publication, including depictions of the fascist perpetrator and victim. It was through these representations that the authors propagated their belief that fascism would once again take hold in Europe and/or Australia if certain cultural and political conditions were enabled.Set during the war years or in the years shortly following the war's conclusion, Roll Back the Night and Heatwave in Berlin incorporate literary specificities that the Australian scholar H. M. Green noticed in Australian literature being published around the time:Not long after the ending of the First World War, with the gradual realization that it had not been the war to end all wars, and with the depression that soon followed, change of attitude set in, which was accentuated by the arrival of the Second World War and by the growing fears of third. In the literature that arose in these conditions, self-confidence was qualified by realization that the world had become much more difficult and dangerous, and Australia was an inescapable part of it. …