Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
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. At the beginning of The Seventh Cross stands the sentence: "This book is dedicated to the dead and living Anti-Fascists of Germany." In a letter written in 1938, Anna Seghers described her project as follows: "A tale that makes it possible to get to know the many layers of fascist Germany through the fortunes of a single man." The story of seven political prisoners who, at the start of the book, break out of a Nazi camp and flee across Germany was designed to be a contribution to the fight against fascism, but also as the portrait of a nation which had plunged the rest of the world and itself into disaster and misery. The book, in which one by one the escapees are picked off, and yet one, in the end, escapes to fight again, offered the hope that there might be an effective resistance to the Nazis is also an unabashed and supremely suspenseful thriller. (An international besteller, it was made into a movie and a comic book in the US.) The original translation into English was heavily abridged. Margot Dembo's new translation is the first in English to present Segher's most famous novel in full.