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442 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1942
When Anna Seghers published this novel in 1942, she was living in Mexico, an exile from her native Germany. A Jewess married to an Hungarian Communist, she had double reason to flee to France when Hitler came to power in 1933. And reason again in 1940, when Paris fell. Her novel, a rare German denunciation of the Nazi regime while it was at its height, was a major success when it first appeared in an abridged version, gaining further popularity with the 1944 Fred Zinnemann movie starring Spencer Tracy. For a summary of the plot, I can't do better than quote Wikipedia:
The story of Das siebte Kreuz is rather simple: there are seven men who have been imprisoned in the fictitious Westhofen camp, who have decided to make a collaborative escape attempt. The main character is a Communist, George Heisler; the narrative follows his path across the countryside, taking refuge with those few who are willing to risk a visit from the Gestapo, while the rest of the escapees are gradually overtaken by their hunters.The novel flirts with several different genres, although it is ahead of the curve in most of them. The image above and much of the publicity for the book suggest an early iteration of the now-familiar Nazi concentration-camp tropes. These, however, are a comparatively minor aspect of the book, and the camp commandant is in fact opposed by his subordinates. There are pre-echoes of later Holocaust stories, but they are very faint; these are political prisoners, not racial undesirables. The camp escape story as a specific trope would also come into its own in the aftermath of WW2, but the hero-on-the-run genre goes back at least to the war before that, in books such as The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan. By concentrating on the fate of just one man among the seven escapees, Seghers takes us deep within his mind and builds a good deal of suspense when she wants to. But the book is too long, too complex, and too unfocused to make an entirely successful thriller—and that, I believe, is because the exiled writer is also trying to do something else. To see what that is, take this random paragraph from the first chapter:
The title of the book comes from a conceit of the prison camp. The current officer in charge has ordered the creation of these seven crosses from the trees nearby, to be used when the prisoners are returned—not for crucifixion, but a subtler torture: the escapees are made to stand all day in front of their crosses, and will be punished if they falter.
As Franz was pedaling past the neighboring Mangold farm, they were in the process of setting up ladders, poles, and baskets under their mighty Mollebusch pear tree. Sophie, the oldest daughter—a strong girl, a bit stout but not fat, with delicate wrists and ankles—was the first to jump up on a ladder, at the same time calling out something to Franz. Although he couldn't make out what she'd said, he turned around briefly and laughed. He was overcome by a feeling of belonging. People who feel and act feebly will have trouble understanding him. For them, belonging means having a particular family, a specific community, or a love affair. For Franz it meant simply belonging to this bit of soil, to its people, and being a member of the morning shift cycling to the Hoechst plant, but above all it meant belonging to the living.Pages before we even see the protagonist, George Heisler, we are immersed in the pastoral landscape of the Taunus area, northwest of Frankfurt. And we shall return to this place and these people many times before the book ends; it will be a long time before we see its connection to the escape plot. It is an affectionate portrayal, nostalgic even, but appropriately so, for this is the country in which Seghers herself (real name Netty Reiling) grew up. Parts of the book at least are an exile's hymn of love to a lost paradise. As the director Fred Zinnemann, another exile, realized. Unable to film in Germany, he had to evoke the setting through painted backgrounds like the following:
... a cross section of contemporary German society and to provide a certain explanation of how Germany ticked, this nation that had plunged the rest of the world and itself as well into disaster and misery.Ostensibly a suspense thriller (it certainly doesn't lack the tension of one), it shoots out of the gate with a simple brushstroke: seven men escape from a concentration camp. We don't learn much about six of those men or their fates - they are either returned or they die. But we learn everything there is to know about the seventh: George Heisler is presented in all of his flawed humanity.
We all felt how profoundly and terribly outside forces can reach into a human being, to his innermost self. But we also sensed that in that innermost core there was something that was unassailable and inviolable.
Fear is the condition in which a certain idea begins to overrun everything else.
She knew nothing of the shadow behind the border posts of reality, and less than nothing of the strange proceedings that take place between the border posts: when reality fades into nothingness and can never return, or when the shadows show a desire to come crowding back in order to be taken for real once more.
Was it permissible to jeopardize man because of another? If so, under what conditions? Yes, it was permissible. Not only permissible, but imperative.
Only when nothing at all is possible any longer does life pass by like a shadow. But the periods when everything is possible contain all of life — and of destruction.
All of us felt how ruthlessly and fearfully outward powers could strike to the very core of man, but at the same time we felt that at the very core there was something that was unassailable and inviolable.