Anna Seghers

Anna Seghers’s Transit is an existential, political, literary thriller that explores the agonies of boredom, the vitality of storytelling, and the plight of the exile with extraordinary compassion and insight. Having escaped from a Nazi concentration camp in Germany in 1937, and later a camp in Rouen, the nameless twenty-seven-year-old German narrator of Seghers’s multilayered masterpiece ends up in the dusty seaport of Marseille. Along the way he is asked to deliver a letter to a man named Weidel in Paris and discovers Weidel has committed suicide, leaving behind a suitcase containing letters and the manuscript of a novel. As he makes his way to Marseille to find Weidel’s widow, the narrator assumes the identity of a refugee named Seidler, though the authorities think he is really Weidel. There in the giant waiting room of Marseille, the narrator converses with the refugees, listening to their stories over pizza and wine, while also gradually piecing together the story of Weidel, whose manuscript has shattered the narrator’s “deathly boredom,” bringing him to a deeper awareness of the transitory world the refugees inhabit as they wait and wait for that most precious of possessions: transit papers.

Transit

Seven prisoners escape from Westhofen concentration camp. Seven crosses are erected and the commander vows to capture the fugitives within seven days. Six are caught quickly, but George Heisler slips through his pursuers' fingers and it becomes a matter of pride to track him down, no matter what. The net is closing in. Who can George trust?; who will betray him? The years have changed those he knew best: his little brother is now an SS officer; his ex-wife's house is constantly watched. Whoever aids in his escape will pay with their life. Hunted, injured and desperate, time is running out and George needs to find someone he can trust.The Seventh Cross is a powerful novel documenting the insidious beginnings of Nazi rule: the sudden imprisonments and seething paranoia.The Seventh Cross was written during the Second World War by one of the most important German writers of the twentieth century - a German Jew living in exile. Her aim, she said, was to write, 'A tale that makes it possible to get to know the many layers of fascist Germany through the fortunes of a single man.' She had four copies of the manuscript: one was destroyed in an air raid; a friend lost the second copy while fleeing the Nazis; another was found by the Gestapo; and only the fourth copy survived, sent to her publisher in America, as the writer fled from France. Published in 1942, The Seventh Crossbecame an immediate bestseller and is one of the only depictions of concentration camps during the Second World War.

The Seventh Cross

A new translation of the best and most provocative short stories by the author of Transit and The Seventh Cross. Best known for her anti-fascist novels such as The Seventh Cross and the existential thriller Transit, Anna Seghers was also a gifted storyteller. The short stories she wrote throughout her life portray her social and mythic vision, and constitute an important and fascinating element of her work. This selection of Seghers's best stories, written between 1925 and 1965, reflects the range of her creativity over the years and includes her most famous stories, such as the autobiographical "The Dead Girls' Class Trip," as well as those translated into English for the first time, like "Jans Must Die." Here are psychologically penetrating stories about young men corrupted by desperation and women bound by circumstance, as well as enigmatic tales of bewilderment and enchantment, stories based on myths and legends like "The Best Tales of Woynok the Thief," "The Legends of Artemis," and "The Three Trees." Seghers used the German language in especially unconventional and challenging ways in her stories, and Margot Bettauer Dembo's sensitive and skilled translation preserves this distinction.

Selected Stories

The Dead Girls' Class Trip

Ein Roman aus Hitlerdeutschland

Das siebte Kreuz

Transit.

Das Siebte Kreuz

und andere Erzählungen

Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen

Morde-ha javān mī mānand

Der Aufslug Der Toten Madchen

A revelatory World War II novel about a German prisoner of war fleeing for the border and encountering a variety of Germans, good and bad and indifferent, along his way. Now available in a new English translation. The Seventh Cross is one of the most powerful, popular, and influential novels of the twentieth century, a hair raising thriller that helped to alert the world to the grim realities of Nazi Germany and that is no less exciting today than when it was first published in 1942. Seven political prisoners escape from a Nazi prison camp; in response, the camp commandant has seven trees harshly pruned to resemble seven crosses: they will serve as posts to torture each recaptured prisoner, and capture, of course, is certain. Meanwhile, the escapees split up and flee across Germany, looking for such help and shelter as they can find along the way, determined to reach the border. Anna Seghers's novel is not only a supremely suspenseful story of flight and pursuit but also a detailed portrait of a nation in the grip and thrall of totalitarianism. Margot Bettauer Dembo's expert new translation makes the complete text of this great political novel available in English for the first time.

The seventh cross

ein Roman aus Hitlerdeutschland

Die Reisebegegnung

Drei Frauen aus Haiti

Roman

Der Weg durch den Februar

Alemania, otoño de 1936. Siete presos se escapan de un campo de concentración. En el campo se levantan siete cruces, una señal de los que les espera cuando sean hechos de nuevo prisioneros. Poco a poco, los presos son capturados, vivos o muertos, devueltos al campo y colgados de la cruz. Pero el séptimo prisionero no aparece. La séptima cruz, destinada a Georg Heisler, mecánico de profesión, se convierte en todo un símbolo de esperanza y resistencia. A pesar del terror perfectamente, el régimen nazi se ve enfrentado a su propia impotencia e irritación. Escrita desde el exilio provocado por la llegada al poder del régimen nazi, La sépima cruz retrata esa época y las condiciones que la situación histórica imponían al individuo.

Anna Seghers

About

Books

Join the club