Mela's Reviews > The Seventh Cross

The novel powerfully documents the insidious rise of a fascist regime - the seething paranoia, the sudden arrests, the silence and fear. [a summary]

Fear is the condition in which a certain idea begins to overrun everything else.

It was a knowing portrait of the perils of ordinary life in Hitler's Germany before the IIWW. [Joseph Kanon]

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.

The story gave the sense of an endless string of unbelievable things happening, leading to a murky, underwatery sensibility. [J.]

Was it permissible to jeopardize man because of another? If so, under what conditions? Yes, it was permissible. Not only permissible, but imperative.

The characters were so human that it hurt. Their life choices, their lot, the unfairness, hopelessness, and striving for happiness were heartwrenching.

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.

I think there are not many books, novels that remind us of ordinary Germans that were also victims of time and Nazi ideology. It is important to remember those Germans too.

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.