Seventh Cross

Literature & Fiction

SEGHERS, ANNA

Literary

Virago/Little Brown Book Group

Transit (Virago Modern Classics)

Virago

George Heisler, a Communist, escapes from Westhofen Prison camp in rural Germany and must find local residents willing to help him flee the country

The Seventh Cross (Voices of Resistance)

Genre Fiction

Monthly Review+press

The Seventh Cross

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Kessinger Publishing

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Contemporary

This is a new release of the original 1942 edition.

Literary Licensing, LLC

Anna Seghers’s Transit is an existential, political, literary thriller that explores the agonies of boredom, the vitality of storytelling, and the plight of the exile with extraordinary compassion and insight. Having escaped from a Nazi concentration camp in Germany in 1937, and later a camp in Rouen, the nameless twenty-seven-year-old German narrator of Seghers’s multilayered masterpiece ends up in the dusty seaport of Marseille. Along the way he is asked to deliver a letter to a man named Weidel in Paris and discovers Weidel has committed suicide, leaving behind a suitcase containing letters and the manuscript of a novel. As he makes his way to Marseille to find Weidel’s widow, the narrator assumes the identity of a refugee named Seidler, though the authorities think he is really Weidel. There in the giant waiting room of Marseille, the narrator converses with the refugees, listening to their stories over pizza and wine, while also gradually piecing together the story of Weidel, whose manuscript has shattered the narrator’s “deathly boredom,” bringing him to a deeper awareness of the transitory world the refugees inhabit as they wait and wait for that most precious of possessions: transit papers.

Transit (New York Review Books (Paperback))

United States

NYRB Classics

A revelatory World War II novel about a German prisoner of war fleeing for the border and encountering a variety of Germans, good and bad and indifferent, along his way. Now available in a new English translation. The Seventh Cross is one of the most powerful, popular, and influential novels of the twentieth century, a hair raising thriller that helped to alert the world to the grim realities of Nazi Germany and that is no less exciting today than when it was first published in 1942. Seven political prisoners escape from a Nazi prison camp; in response, the camp commandant has seven trees harshly pruned to resemble seven crosses: they will serve as posts to torture each recaptured prisoner, and capture, of course, is certain. Meanwhile, the escapees split up and flee across Germany, looking for such help and shelter as they can find along the way, determined to reach the border. Anna Seghers’s novel is not only a supremely suspenseful story of flight and pursuit but also a detailed portrait of a nation in the grip and thrall of totalitarianism. Margot Bettauer Dembo’s expert new translation makes the complete text of this great political novel available in English for the first time.

The Seventh Cross (New York Review Books classics)

A new translation of the best and most provocative short stories by the author of Transit and The Seventh Cross. Best known for the anti-fascist novelThe Seventh Crossand the existential thrillerTransit, Anna Seghers was also a gifted writer of short fiction. The stories she wrote throughout her life reflect her political activism as well as her deep engagement with myth; they are also some of her most formally experimental work. This selection of Seghers's best stories, written between 1925 and 1965, displays the range of her creativity over the years. It includes her most famous short fiction, such as the autobiographical "The Dead Girls' Class Trip," and others, like "Jans Is Going to Die," that have been translated into English here for the first time. There are psychologically penetrating stories about young men corrupted by desperation and women bound by circumstance, as well as enigmatic tales of bewilderment and enchantment based on myths and legends, like "The Best Tales of Woynok, the Thief," "The Three Trees," and "Tales of Artemis." In her stories, Seghers used the German language in especially unconventional and challenging ways, and Margot Bettauer Dembo's sensitive and skilled translation preserves this distinction.

The Dead Girls' Class Trip: Selected Stories (New York Review Books Classics)

Aboard a cargo ship sailing from Brazil to the German Democratic Republic in the mid-1950s, two men strike up a conversation: newly-qualified doctor, Ernst Triebel, and engineer Franz Hammer, two GDR citizens of contrasting character, brought together by chance on an Atlantic crossing. During the next three weeks Triebel will relate to Hammer what amounts to his life story. Hammer, a reluctant sea passenger, is initially uninterested, but once the love interest of the story’s subtitle enters the fray he is gripped until the memorable climax to Triebel’s narrative. With loving attention to detail Anna Seghers describes people and events aboard the ship as the realistic backdrop to an epic yet deeply human story about individual struggle for identity and belonging. Seghers’s carefully crafted and controlled narrative is a paean to the art of storytelling. The reader is invited aboard Seghers’s borderless maritime community from the first page to share in this timeless meditation on the joy and pain of human existence. At the time of its publication in 1971, Crossing was described as the culmination of Anna Seghers’s creative endeavors. A committed activist and writer who lived through many of the twentieth century’s most horrific political and historical events and tackled them in deeply humanist writing, Seghers’s exile literature from the 1940s, in particular The Seventh Cross (1942/46) and Transit (1944), have been widely translated and received international acclaim. But her later work, written as a citizen of the German Democratic Republic, remains largely overlooked in English translation, until now. While the earlier work was set in the horror of World War II, this immaculately crafted novel seeks to counter global polarity during the Cold War era and demonstrates Seghers’s firmly internationalist outlook. “When I speak of Anna Seghers I cannot but think of those who, alongside her, belong to the great writers who have come together out of love for truth, freedom, culture, peace and socialism, yes out of love for the fate of humanity.” —Jorge Amado “... in terms of the quality of her narrative style and scope of her narrative vision, Seghers was the greatest German woman writer of the twentieth century.” —Helen Fehervary "Your eyes are used to seeing, perceiving and understanding things unseen, things distant or lost. You capture them in your stories…" —Pablo Neruda

Crossing: A Love Story

Dialogos

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by SEGHERS, ANNA. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by SEGHERS, ANNA

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by SEGHERS, ANNA. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Seventh Cross

Transit (Virago Modern Classics)

The Seventh Cross (Voices of Resistance)

The Seventh Cross

The Seventh Cross

The Seventh Cross

Transit (New York Review Books (Paperback))

The Seventh Cross (New York Review Books classics)

The Dead Girls' Class Trip: Selected Stories (New York Review Books Classics)

Crossing: A Love Story