March 22, 2021
German writer Seghers (1900–1983) was among the first writers to address the rise and aftermath of Nazism with works such as Transit, a legacy well documented in this clear-eyed collection. The stories straddle history—“The Square” follows the family of communist leader Ernst Thälmann after he was arrested by the Gestapo—and myth—“Tales of Artemis” features an old hunter sharing stories of seeing a goddess in the woods and of a boy who strayed fatally into their hunting ground. “The Ship of the Argonauts” combines both themes, describing a man’s return home with his Golden Fleece to a land made strange, a clear metaphor for survivors of the Holocaust. In the explicit “A Man Becomes a Nazi,” a desperate outsider is seduced by the promise of power, and “The End” follows two men—one a survivor of the concentration camps, the other his jailer—as they reencounter each other in the countryside. Seghers’s masterly title story, written near the end of the war, casts an idyllic school outing in a dark pall, anticipating the fates of the innocent children. The result is classic European storytelling at its most potent.
March 15, 2021
A collection of stories spanning Seghers' accomplished career. Seghers, a German Jewish writer, left the country in time to avoid the worst of Hitler's excesses, but in her many novels and short stories, she dedicated herself to a stringent and ongoing analysis of fascism: its victims, its resisters, and, occasionally, its admirers. Most of the stories included in this collection are concerned with the war. In "A Man Becomes a Nazi," Seghers traces the life of a man who did indeed become a Nazi; she may have meant the story as an attempt to at least understand, if not sympathize with, at least one individual from a mass of many, but the result is somewhat flat-footed. When her character starts attending political meetings, he "learned that the cause of all his problems was the Versailles Treaty created by the Jews and the Free Masons in order to enslave him." Seghers probably meant to humanize him, but her character turns out, instead, a caricature. She was by no means a subtle writer. Seghers was concerned with major questions, and she pursued those questions in her fiction relentlessly. What does fascism do to a person's soul? she asks again and again. In the title story, one of Seghers' best known, a woman imagines herself with her old schoolmates on a class trip to the Rhine. As "Netty" (Seghers' own nickname) scans the scene, she intersperses her descriptions of the children in the years before World War I with the lives they grew up to endure. "Marianne and Leni, of whom one would later suffer the loss of her child because of the other," she writes, "were walking out of the little seesaw garden, their arms thrown about each other's necks." It's a poignant and affecting story, even if Seghers underscores her point several times over. The collection also includes stories from early in Seghers' career as well as tales based on myths rather than war ("Tales of Artemis," for one), but the main thrust of Seghers' obsession remains clear, and some stories are more successful than others. Unrelenting and sometimes heavy-handed, at their best Seghers' stories are also moving and deeply intelligent.
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