Anna Seghers' The Seventh Cross (#ccspin)

"The National Socialist state relentlessly prosecutes anyone who commits an offense against the national community; it protects that which is worth protecting; it punishes those who deserve punishment; it destroys that which should be destroyed."

Or so says Commandant Fahrenberg of the Westhofen concentration camp. But he's just had a breakout of seven prisoners from his camp, and it's a big black eye to his leadership. Will he recapture them all? Is the National Socialist state that powerful?

No. We already know from the prologue that one (but only one) will make it to freedom. It's a novel with thrills and narrative drive. But not just that.

We spend most of our time with George Heisler, the one who makes it safely to Holland, but we see all seven as they attempt to escape the Nazis. One is killed just outside the camp boundaries, another is betrayed, a third despairs and turns himself in, the next to last to be found can think of nothing but revenge against the fellow politician who framed him.

But it's not only the escapees who feature in the novel: it's also the people who help him and hinder him, family, friends, strangers. Also the SS and the SA troopers who pursue him. He escapes one checkpoint because he's so beaten down by his years in the concentration camp he no longer matches the picture that's distributed. George steals a gardener's prized jacket to cover up his prison clothes; the gardener  at first wants George caught, but then starts to think of George as 'his' escapee and lies about the jacket when it's found, sending the searchers astray. In a letter of 1938, cited in the afterword, Seghers writes of her novel that it's 'a tale, then, that makes it possible to get to know the many layers of fascist Germany through the fortunes of a single man.'

That one man escaped gives the resistance, both inside the prison and out of it, hope. It only seems that that the state is all-powerful whatever Fahrenberg may say in that opening quote. It's not true. A childhood friend Paul Roeder, one of the key figures in helping George to escape says, "But they are not the slightest bit all-knowing. They only know what you tell them." And you don't have to tell them anything.

Anna Seghers herself was arrested in 1933 after Hitler came to power. She'd married a Hungarian Communist and was involved in Communist organizations. Once the Nazis felt solidified in their power, she was released, but she was of Jewish extraction and felt it safer to leave the country, first for France and then later for Mexico. Her mother was killed in a concentration camp in 1942.

This novel was written in 1938-9, and is set in 1937 or early '38. [Heisler while on the run picks up a discarded newspaper which discusses the battle of Teruel in the Spanish Civil War.] The novel came out with a German emigré press in Mexico in 1942, but was quickly translated into English and became a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection. In 1944 it was made into a movie with Spencer Tracy as George, and Hume Cronyn earned a Best Supporting Oscar nod for his role as that friend. 

A couple of years ago I read Seghers' subsequent novel Transit and thought it also was very good. Both novels turn around a suspenseful plot of escape from the Nazis, but both novels also have ambitions larger than simple suspense.

Seghers was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize, though she didn't win, and based on the now two novels I've read of hers, I'd have to say she would have been a good choice. After World War II, she returned to Germany, eventually pitching up in East Germany, where she died in 1983.

It was my spin book, and while I thought I might read it last month for Women in Translation month, I didn't get around to it. But it was pretty great whenever I read it. Did you join in the Classics Club spin this time? Did you have a good read?

Anna Seghers' Transit (#WITMonth)

 "Aren't you fed up with such thrilling stories?"

The narrator of Anna Seghers' Transit buttonholes the reader and asks that question--with exasperation. With cause. He's a German, persona non grata with the Nazis, stuck in Marseille, in Vichy France. He's neither able to stay, nor to leave, nor to return home. A life less thrilling would be welcome.

Nevertheless, Transit is a story with thrills.

At the start of the novel, the narrator Seidler is in a work camp for enemy aliens in the north of France. He'd already escaped from a Nazi prison into France; as the Nazis roll into France in 1940, the prisoners have to convince the French guard to look the other way as they flee the camp, Seidler escaping for a second time, because most of them would be doomed if caught by the Nazis. 

Seidler makes his way south with other refugees, passing through Paris. He agrees as a favor for a friend to deliver a letter to the writer Weidel, but when he finds Weidel's place of residence, Weidel has committed suicide, leaving only a manuscript and his documents. The letter he was meant to deliver, now undeliverable, tells him that the writer's estranged widow needs the documents, as well as Weidel himself, to get a visa so she can leave France. Seidler takes the manuscript, the documents, the suitcase, and goes south to Marseille to deliver all these things to the waiting widow.

So far the story could easily be by Helen MacInnes or Alan Furst. But Seidler is not a naif caught up in a romance, nor a dedicated anti-Nazi; he's just a mechanic who doesn't like the Nazis (and whom the Nazis do not like.) He'd like to settle in Marseille, stop running. He becomes attached to the child of friends, a child who lives in fear of abandonment. The local authorities tell him he can only stay in Marseille so long as he can demonstrate that he's making efforts to leave. So in addition to MacInnes and Furst, you can throw in a bit of Kafka. Everyone in Marseille is facing the same conundrum: you have to have an exit visa, a transit visa for any country you pass through on your way out, as well as an entry visa for your destination country. Any one of those visas can expire while you're still trying to acquire the others.

He helps people who really do want to leave, who have to leave, but for himself he dates, falls in love, discovers pizza. He just wants a normal-ish life, but he's been thrust into a thriller story, albeit one with Kafka-esque twists.

Anna Seghers herself was German and was arrested in 1933 by the Nazis for being a communist. She was released, but she was also of Jewish ancestry and left for France soon after. She passed through Marseille on her way to Mexico where she spent the war years before returning to East Germany after the war. Transit first appeared in English and Spanish translations in 1944, and not in German until 1948, and then only in East Germany. My edition has an afterward by Heinrich Böll for its first publication in West Germany.

I thought it was very good. One of the interesting things about it were the characters who did not want to go. Sure, Rick Blaine decides to stay, but he never seemed like he would be in danger. I mean, he's Humphrey Bogart after all. In Transit, Seidler is not the only one who doesn't want to cross the ocean. Another returns to Lithuania, his home, even though it's almost certainly a death sentence. Others decide to quit running, knowing or suspecting the cost.

It's Women in Translation month! This was translated by Margot Dembauer Betto for New York Review of Books.