The Seventh Cross

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.

At the beginning of The Seventh Cross stands the sentence: “This book is dedicated to the dead and living Anti-Fascists of Germany.” In a letter written in 1938, Anna Seghers described her project as follows: “A tale that makes it possible to get to know the many layers of fascist Germany through the fortunes of a single man.” The story of seven political prisoners who, at the start of the book, break out of a Nazi camp and flee across Germany was designed to be a contribution to the fight against fascism, but it is also the portrait of a nation that had plunged the rest of the world and itself into disaster and misery. The book, in which the escapees are picked off one by one, and yet, in the end, one escapes to fight again, offered the hope that there might be an effective resistance to the Nazis, but it is also an unabashed and supremely suspenseful thriller.

An international best seller, The Seventh Cross was made into a movie and a comic book in the United States. The original translation into English was heavily abridged. Margot Bettauer Dembo’s new translation is the first in English to present Seghers’s most famous novel in full.

Anna Seghers (née Netty Reiling; 1900–1983) was born in Mainz, Germany, into an upper-middle-class Jewish family. She was a sickly and introverted child by her own account, but became an intellectually curious student, eventually earning a doctorate in art history at the University of Heidelberg in 1924; her first story, written under the name Antje Seghers, was published in the same year. In 1925 she married a Hungarian immigrant economist and began her writing career in earnest. By 1929 Seghers had joined the Communist Party, given birth to her first child, and received the Kleist Prize for her first novel, The Revolt of the Fisherman. Having settled in France in 1933, Seghers was forced to flee again after the 1940 Nazi invasion. With the aid of Varian Fry, Seghers, her husband, and two children sailed from Marseille to Mexico on a ship that included among its passengers Victor Serge, André Breton, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. After the war she moved to East Berlin, where she became an emblematic figure of East German letters, actively championing the work of younger writers from her position as president of the Writers Union and publishing at a steady pace. Among Seghers’s internationally regarded works are The Seventh Cross (1939; adapted for film in 1944 by MGM), one of the only World War II–era depictions of Nazi concentration camps; the novella Excursion of the Dead Girls (1945); The Dead Stay Young (1949); and the story collection Benito’s Blue (1973).

Margot Bettauer Dembo has translated works by Judith Hermann, Robert Gernhardt, Joachim Fest, Ödön von Horváth, and Feridun Zaimoglu, among others. She was awarded the Goethe-Institut/Berlin Translator’s Prize in 1994 and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize in 2003. Dembo has also worked as a translator for two feature documentary films: The Restless Conscience, which was nominated for an Academy Award, and The Burning Wall. Her translation of Transit by Anna Seghers was published by NYRB Classics in 2013.