"Anna Seghers was an admirable woman in many ways, but above all she was a remarkable humanist: she became a model of cultural resistance and ideological struggle who cut across borders, and who, still today, thanks to her work, transcends time and lives on in our memory. Anna Seghers' novels don't only recount stories of terror, escape, and oppression; they are a call to compassion and solidarity." –Fernanda Melchor
"[Seghers' language] is simple and serious, and intimate, immediate, vital: a language that belongs to the people it describes but remains always at a distance."
–Rey Conquer,
The Los Angeles Review of Books "Not only an important novel, but an important historical document. This new, unabridged translation is a genuine publishing event." –Joseph Kanon, author of
The Good German and
Leaving Berlin
"As a demonstration of what life under Nazism does to the mind and soul of many typical Germans,
The Seventh Cross is a searching, brilliantly skillful job." –Orville Prescott,
The New York Times "Seghers taught my generation and anyone who had an ear to listen after that not-to-be-forgotten war to distinguish right from wrong.
The Seventh Cross shaped me; it sharpened my vision." –Günter Grass
"A masterpiece. Written in the midst of terror, but with such clarity, such acuity; Seghers is a writer of rare insight." –Rachel Seiffert, author of
A Boy in Winter "A fascinating insight into life in pre-war Nazi Germany just as the horrors of the Nazi regime were beginning to unfold. This is an important novel, as much for its picture of German society as for its insight into the psyche of ordinary people confronting their personal fears and mixed loyalties while an escapee from an early concentration camp attempts to avoid recapture." –Simon Mawer, author of
The Glass Room
