‘It could happen here’: Lord of the Flies took its lessons from Hitler’s Germany. They speak to now

This is an article in our Guide to the Classics series.

I first encountered William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies in my final year of primary school in the UK. A long-term staple of English and Australian classrooms, it invites debate about human nature, morality and the creeping dangers of unchecked power and herd behaviour.

The cover of the edition I read bore an ink drawing of a severed pig’s head, its eyes closed, blood streaming from its mouth. The vivid, disturbing image remains fresh in my mind decades later. It felt less like an illustration than a portent.

Set during wartime, Lord of the Flies tells the tale of a group of British schoolboys marooned on a tropical desert island after the plane evacuating them crashes. With no adults to guide them, the boys attempt to build a makeshift social order, establishing rules and electing a leader. But the fragile system soon teeters and collapses. Fear and resentment take hold. Violence follows.

Among the younger boys, rumours circulate about a threatening presence on the island. The idea of a “beast” begins to influence behaviour, lending form to anxieties that might otherwise have remained diffuse and unspoken.

At the centre of the mounting tension is a struggle between Ralph and another boy, Jack. Ralph remains committed to rules and procedure – to the maintenance of order and the hope of rescue. Jack, on the other hand, grows increasingly impatient with the idea of restraint. Hunting becomes his priority, and with it comes a very different model of leadership, one grounded less in consent than in command.

Stuck in the middle is Piggy – an asthmatic, overweight and bespectacled boy whose real name we never learn. Intellectually alert, he grasps the symbolic importance of objects and concepts more clearly than most. But he is mocked, interrupted, and continually sidelined. In certain respects, Piggy serves as a barometer of the group’s moral health – and as a measure of Ralph’s character. To defend Piggy is to defend reason itself.

I remember our faltering discussions revolving around what I now recognise as an age-old question: nature or nurture? Were the murderous schoolboys shaped by their circumstances, or were those circumstances merely revealing something already present?

Golding, a schoolteacher deeply marked by his Navy service in World War Two, wrote his novel to say,

you think that now the war is over and an evil thing destroyed, you are safe because you are naturally kind and decent. But I know why the thing rose in Germany. I know it could happen in any country. It could happen here.

Its stark warning about the thin veneer of civilisation – and the speed with which it can give way – continues to resonate in our age of resurgent authoritarianism (including in the United States), routine atrocity (including Sudan, Gaza and Ukraine) and an increasingly feverish public sphere.

A new BBC adaptation of the novel, by Adolescence creator Jack Thorne, is now streaming, to mixed reviews. He told the ABC he sees resonances between the “climate of populism and hate” Golding was writing about in the early days of the Cold War, and our current moment.

The adolescent cruelty and rage he drew on to write his portrait of young toxic masculinity are infused into his Lord of the Flies.

A moral fable

Golding studied the sciences before switching to English literature and training as a teacher. His early career was interrupted by World War Two. In the Royal Navy, he served in the North Atlantic and took part in the D-Day landings at Normandy. He later described the conflict as “the great formative experience” of his life.

When he returned to teaching, he began drafting what would become Lord of the Flies. Former pupils at the provincial grammar school where he taught classics recalled their schoolmaster intently writing at his desk during lessons. There, he composed his despondent fable about the collapse of order among boys not unlike them.

In a 1965 essay, Golding insisted Lord of the Files was not a realist novel in the conventional sense, but a fable – and therefore unapologetically moral. As he put it: “The fabulist is a moralist. He cannot make a story without a human lesson tucked away in it.”

Golding knew this was deeply unfashionable, acknowledging most audiences “do not much like moral lessons”. But he stood by the approach, “with all its drawbacks and difficulties” – and knew “the pill has to be sugared, has to be witty or entertaining, or engaging in some way or other”.

Ironically, he famously came to detest the book that bought him fame and fortune, dismissing it later as “boring and crude”. He went on to write 12 other novels, winning the Booker Prize in 1980 for Rites of Passage. In 1983, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Human nature, revealed

The marooned schoolboys in the novel must decide how to look after and govern themselves. They start by attempting to reproduce the structures of the world they have left behind. An assembly is called and rules are agreed upon. A conch shell becomes a symbol of authority, granting the one who holds it the right to speak. A signal fire is lit in the hope of rescue.

At first, there is a real sense of possibility. The island appears abundant and beautiful. Freed from classrooms and the drudgery of routine, the boys experience a surge of excitement. Golding’s description of Ralph, one of the novel’s primary figures, captures that early exhiliration:

He patted the palm trunk softly; and forced at last to believe in the reality of the island, laughed delightedly again, and stood on his head.

But then things start to fall apart. Consensus proves difficult to maintain. Discipline falters. Responsibilities are shirked.

As allegiances shift, the boys divide and the balance of power alters. It unfolds gradually, through small concessions and the accumulated weight of slights and petty grievances. The island, once a setting for adventure, becomes an arena in which a darker understanding of human nature is revealed.

The names of Golding’s central protagonists are key to unlocking the work, written in the dying days of the British Empire. Ralph and Jack are borrowed from R.M. Ballanyte’s 1857 novel The Coral Island, a Victorian narrative in which a trio of shipwrecked English boys embody pluck, Christian virtue and imperial confidence.

In Ballantyne’s book, evil is external. It arrives in the guise of cannibals and pirates. The danger lies beyond the boys, not within them. Their moral certainty remains intact. Steadfast, they take solace in their own innate goodness. The island tests their ingenuity, but not their character.

Golding challenged those assumptions. Ballantyne’s island, he observed, belonged to the 19th century. His would belong to the 20th. If the earlier tale reflected what he called the “smugness” of its age, Lord of the Flies would interrogate the confidence of his own.

‘What one man could do to another’

The “truth” of the novel stemmed from Golding’s profound disillusionment. Before World War II, he believed in what he called “the perfectibility of social man” – the idea that the correct social structures would “produce goodwill” and that injustice could be cured through “reorganization” and reform. But after 1945, he understood “what one man could do to another”.

He was reflecting on the decades between the two world wars in Europe – the rise of fascism and the consolidation of autocratic regimes in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. What disturbed him more deeply than “one man killing another with a gun, or dropping a bomb on him” was “the vileness beyond all words that went on, year after year, in the totalitarian states”.

These crimes, he stressed, were carried out “skilfully, coldly, by educated men, doctors, lawyers, by men with a tradition of civilization behind them, to beings of their own kind”.

Western civilisation had neither eliminated cruelty, nor prevented brutality. In some cases, it had rendered them systematic and efficient. The problem had nothing to do with political systems or failed institutions. The problem was humanity.

He had come to believe “man was sick – not exceptional man, but average man”. He said “the best job I could do at the time was to trace the connection between the connection between his diseased nature and the international mess he gets himself into”.

He was clear about his book’s message:

if humanity has a future on this planet of hundred million years, it is unthinkable that it should spend those aeons in a ferment of national self-satisfaction and chauvinistic idiocies.

Alexander Howard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.