Anna Seghers


This novel{The Seventh Cross: A Novel from Hitler's Germany} tells the story of seven escapees from a concentration camp. While this is a work of fiction, it may still be of interest: Written in the late 30s-early 40s, and published in 1942, it was immediately translated and became a big bestseller in a number of allied countries, including the U.S. It was even printed in an "armed forces edition" for U.S. troops. An English translation with a foreword by Kurt Vonnegut and an afterword by Dorothy Rosenberg has recently been published by New York: Monthly Review Press, c1987 as part of the Voices of Resistance series.

Rescuers During The Holocaust

* * *

The seventh cross (1942) relates the adventures of a survivor, a Communist, between seven men sent to a Nazi concentration camp; The deads do not age (1949) narrates the life of a group of Communists between 1918 and 1945. In 1944 it published in Mexico, in Spanish version, his novel Visa of transit , another one of his masterpieces, considered in addition like the main novel that has been written on exile. Also it wrote tests, gathered in On Tolstoi and Dostoievski (both of 1962). In 1974 their poems in a volume took shelter.

google trans. of El Poder de la Palabra page on Seghers

* * *

Seghers's silence in the late 1950s in the Stalinist trial of Walter Janka, the director of Aufbau publishing company, has shadowed her reputation among leftist intellectuals.

Books and Writers
{this sentence is repeated verbatim on at least four websites that mention her.}

* * *

The Seventh Cross was made into a successful Hollywood film, directed by Fred Zinnemann and starring Spencer Tracy.
{which was on TCM six days ago, though I didn't see it.}