A few years ago in grad school I came across a blood-chilling line in a primary document from the Nazi genocide in Serbia. It was an operating manual for one of their mobile gas chambers, and the line was something to the effect of, Any screams emanating from the back of the truck may be blocked out with such-and-such method. The horrendous thing was that these “screams” were completely disembodied from those who must have made them, within the bureaucratic grammar of the manual.
Those screams appeared again, late in The Seventh Cross by Anna Seghers, this time in the Rhineland in the early 30s:
How silent was the night! Instead of being filled with the sound of sirens, of pistol shots and the roar of engines—the sounds of a monstrous search in which everyone was participating—this was the most silent of nights, an ordinary night between two workdays. No searchlight beams crisscrossed the sky. For all the villagers round about the autumn stars were lost in the mist; only the soft but penetrating light of a moon that was waning with the passing of the week found those who longed to be found. After a hard day’s work everyone and everything was sleeping. It was peaceful, except for a few screams coming from the Westhofen concentration camp. Screams that now and then woke someone up who then sat up and listened.
Such dark, pastoral descriptions occur elsewhere in the book, and I wondered what this Tolstoyan kind of realism was doing in a novel that otherwise reads like a tight political thriller, propelled by a Nazi concentration camp breakout and escape by Communists. The villain Aldinger Fuellgrabe, commandant of the Westhofen camp (and the one sitting up and listening to those screams), erects seven crosses where he expects the fugitives to meet their ultimate fate, after being captured and tortured.
Seghers quickly links us to the hero George Heisler, one of the seven escapees. On the run with an injured hand, he spends the night in the Mainz Cathedral. What follows is a beautiful passage of the peculiar change of lighting within the building:
The dusk inside the cathedral was so profound that the colors in the windows became obscured, the walls receded, the ceiling vaults rose, and the columns aligned themselves into endless rows rising into an uncertainty that might have been nothing or perhaps infinity. …
The twilight wasn’t seeping in from the outside as it did on ordinary evenings. The cathedral itself seemed to be dissolving and losing its contours. The vines climbing the columns, the grimacing faces, and over there a pierced naked foot were all chimera and smoke; everything made of stone was evaporating, and it was George who was petrified with fear.
Later, George visits Dr. Lowenstein in town to patch up his hand. This is an incredible scene, where the Doctor, aware of the news of the escape, sees who George is, concludes that he is a doomed man just by letting George in—and proceeds to treat the fugitive for free anyway. The sequence is narrated without spoken dialog, and it’s as if George can read the Doctor’s mind:
Slowly the doctor turned away, feeling himself turn pale. He went over to the sink, and when he looked at himself in the mirror, there was already a brackish shadow on his face. He closed his eyes. He soaped his hands and washed them with infinite slowness, letting the waters run. I have a wife and children. Why did this person come to me? I tremble every time the bell rings. All the things I have to put up with…
George stared at the doctor’s back. He thought, You’re not the only one.
Then the doctor held his hands under the water, making it splash. Unbearable, all the things I have to bear. And now this on top of everything else. It’s impossible that one should have to suffer like this.
But you’re not the only one, George thought again, frowning, while the water flowed like a fountain.
Then the doctor turned off the faucet. He dried his hands on a fresh towel. For the first time he smelled the chloroform the way his patients usually smelled it. Why did this man come to me of all people? To me in particular? Why?
While we spend the most time with George, the novel actually has a massive cast of characters (the other six escapees get fleshed out a little as well, and each has a different fate and attitude toward it), many of whom confront difficult decisions and cope with the pressure of the newly-consolidated Nazi state that seems to pervade over everything, even out here in the countryside. Late in the novel, Liesel and Paul Roeder, childhood friends of George, give him shelter, even though they initially seem pro-Nazi. At one point, Liesel reflects on choosing family over the fuhrer, and it’s as if her elevated consciousness comes from something even deeper than the traditionalism promoted by the Nazi party:
Only once in her life had Liesel ever had anything to do with the police. At the time, she was a child, ten or eleven years old. One of her brothers had gotten into trouble; maybe it was the one who later died in the war, for there was never any mention of it in the family afterward. It had been buried with him in Flanders. But the fear they had all struggled with back then was still in Liesel’s blood today. A fear that had nothing to do with a bad conscience; it was a poor people’s fear, a chicken’s fear under a hawk, a fear of being persecuted by the state. An ancient fear that better defines to whom the state belongs than any constitutions or history books. But now Liesel resolved to fight claw and tooth to protect her family, with cunning and deceit.
Seghers was Jewish and a member of the Communist Party of Germany since 1929. She and her family escaped to Switzerland and then to Paris when Hitler came to power, then from occupied France to Mexico City, where she remained till 1947. She wrote The Seventh Cross from 1938 to 1939 as a conscious anti-Nazi work, and sent out four copies of the manuscript to publishers, three of which were confiscated or destroyed, and the remaining one reaching a German publishing house based in the US. These facts may explain to modern readers why this isn’t a particularly brutal novel, since it was made before the full extent of German fascism’s genocidal project had emerged.
But that point would ignore the choice to set this book in the placid rural landscapes of Osthofen and the outskirts of Mainz; it is a deliberate choice and its significance seems to announce itself very early in the text: a mammoth descriptive passage that opens with “The land dipped in wide, gentle waves behind the shepherd.” The hillsides, the farm fields, the factory smoke, the fog, the turning train tracks, the wilderness, the traces of the last war and wars more ancient: they all churn in a dense, incantatory, even epic tenor that Seghers doesn’t quite activate in the same way again.
The reasoning for this moment, and the choice of setting altogether, didn’t strike me until long after I’d put down this book.
Seghers chose Mainz, where she grew up: she staged and presented the quiet, creeping descent of fascism onto this place of natural and historic beauty.
I thought about the public parks in southwest Portland and the suburbs that I loved to walk through in my youth. Now they are places for Trumpians, Proudboys and other far-right vigilantes to hold demonstrations and assault people.
And Seghers’ subtle devastation disclosed itself.
And that’s another “Red Writer” letter in the books.
Seghers’ work has been amenable to visual adaptation from the beginning. Her debut book was filmed by Irwin Piskator—a pioneer of political theater techniques, and to whom Brecht was a kind of protégé—in 1935 as The Revolt of the Fisherman (extremely obscure, it was once available on YouTube; hopefully it may turn up again).
The Seventh Cross itself was adapted in 1944 as a Hollywood movie directed by Fred Zinnemann, with Spencer Tracey and Agnes Moorehead.
The Austrian cartoonist William Sharp adapted The Seventh Cross into a comic strip series in 1942, which looks like a terrific mixture of Will Eisner’s crime capers with European expressionism.
More recently, another thriller by Seghers, Transit, was turned into a movie in 2018.
See you Friday for an experimental time capsule from the ancient year 2020...