The Seventh Cross - Softcover

Anna Seghers

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1567922538 ISBN 13: 9781567922530

Publisher: David R. Godine, 2004

Synopsis

Written in 1939, first published in 1942, a national bestseller and a 1943 Book-of-the-Month-Club Main Selection, The Seventh Cross presented a first-hand account of life in Hitler's Germany and the horrors of the concentration camps. Seven men attempt an escape from Westhofen; the camp commander erects seven crosses, one for each. Only one, the young communist, Heisler, survives, not by cunning or superior skill, but through the complicity of a web of common citizens unwilling to bow to the Gestapo and forced to make decisions that will determine the character of their future lives.

About this title

About the Author

Anna Seghers was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Mainz. During the twenties she established a modest reputation as a writer committed to social reform. In 1933, when Hitler came to power, Seghers went into exile in France. When France capitulated to the Nazis, she proceeded to Mexico, barely escaping the gestapo. In 1942 she published her novel The Seventh Cross, which tells of seven prisoners who attempt to leave a Nazi labor camp and elude the police. It was immediately translated into English and became an international best-seller. In 1947 she settled in East Berlin, where she was greeted as a national heroine. Seghers began to publish even more prolifically, producing novels and stories in the style of socialist realism. In 1966 she was named president of the East German Writers' Union, an office in which she had considerable influence on cultural policy. She resigned, for personal reasons, in 1978. Seghers's prose is notable for its epic scope and psychological insight. Her reputation, like that of Brecht, remains somewhat clouded by unresolved questions of complicity with the Stalinist regime in former East Germany. After the unification of Germany in 1990, archivists uncovered a novel of hers entitled Der gerechte Richter (The Just Judge), which was critical of the state and which she had deliberately withheld from publication.

Language Notes

Text: English, German (translation)

Edition details

• Publisher: David R. Godine
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1567922538
• ISBN 13: 9781567922530
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 442