March 31, 1987
The first title in the publisher's Voices of Resistance series, this work is about the escape of a Communist, George Heisler, from a Nazi concentration camp and his attempts to flee the country while avoiding the Gestapo and the complicit local population.
March 12, 2018
Originally published in 1942 and available now in its first unabridged English translation, this trenchant tale about life in Nazi Germany is notable for being one of the earliest works of fiction to acknowledge the existence of concentration camps. In the early years of World War II, seven prisoners escape from the Westhofen concentration camp into the nearby town, where several of their spouses and families live, including the ex-lover and child of one prisoner, George Heisler. Seghers provides a panoramic view of the town and its citizens, many of whom are indifferent or oblivious to the turmoil of the distant war, but her main point-of-view character is George, who struggles desperately to elude recapture and frets that “the community that supports and surrounds every person—his blood relatives, lovers, teachers, bosses, and friends—had been turned into a network of living traps.” The novel’s title refers to a torture reserved for concentration camp escapees that bears out Heisler’s fears about “how profoundly and how terribly outside forces can reach into a human being.” Seghers skillfully expresses the inner lives of her characters and their stories are consistently suspenseful. For all the grimness of its events, the novel ends with an affirmation of the human spirit that “in that innermost core there was something that was unassailable and inviolable.”
March 15, 2018
Anti-fascists fight back in World War II Germany in this novel that was written during the war.When seven prisoners escape from the Westhofen concentration camp, the commandant, Fahrenberg, erects seven crosses, made from plane trees, in the yard. Each cross is studded with nails. Each cross is then hung, one by one, with a prisoner, as each of the escapees is found and recaptured. German novelist Seghers (Transit, 2013, etc.) introduces each of the escapees but is primarily concerned with one: George Heisler, once notorious for his womanizing, now for his ability to withstand interrogations without either giving up names or allowing a smirk to drop from his features. This novel, which first appeared in English in 1942 and was made into a film starring Spencer Tracy, is only now appearing in unabridged form in English. It's concerned not with Jewish camp inmates (the word "Jew" appears only once or twice in the entire novel) but with anti-fascist German nationals. It's Heisler's activities on behalf of the Communists that land him in camp, though the precise nature of those activities remains vague. Seghers is mainly concerned with his escape and with the network of characters affected in one way or another by that escape. So we meet Fritz, the hapless young man whose jacket Heisler steals; Franz, a former friend who radicalized Heisler before Heisler stole his girlfriend, Elli, and made her his wife; Elli herself, long estranged from Heisler; Elli's father, who makes a living hanging wallpaper; commandant Fahrenberg; and more--many more. Through these many characters, Seghers is able to provide a thorough autopsy on German society of the time, with its various classes and varying levels of enthusiasm for the current government. Still, there are almost too many characters to keep track of, and we're still meeting new faces in the novel's final pages. Likewise, the narrative itself is loose and rangy in places--it could have benefited from some tightening. But there's no dearth of suspense, and Seghers' skill in describing the many dangers, risks, and accompanying paranoias of the time is unimpeachable.A suspenseful but occasionally long-winded account of a prisoner's escape from a German concentration camp.
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