decency in the face of brute force. The worker Paul Röder, for example, although he benefits in a modest way from the Nazis’ social measures, does not hesitate to hide Heisler. Seghers’s ambivalent socialism is evident from the fact that, like Röder, many of her figures act out of a sense of basic humanism rather than an ideological motivation.

Unlike The Revolt of the Fishermen, The Seventh Cross does not end in complete defeat. When the empty seventh cross was taken down, the unidentified narrator reports in the prologue, the concentration camp inmates reacted with “a weak, strange smileof hope and scorn, of powerlessness and boldness.” In the epilogue, the narrator evokes that “unassailable” and “inviolate” inner sphere of man that gives him the strength to resist powerful forces—an indication that for the author the category of hope could not be grasped exclusively in terms of the contemporary political situation. One of the initial passages of the novel, in fact, establishes a historical framework that transcends the time of action. Seghers applies the historical perspective to intimate that the Third Reich is only a passing, if particularly brutal, episode in the lives of the successive generations populating her native region, situated between Mainz on the Rhine and Frankfurt on the Main. At the same time, the historical perspective is not intended to instill futile hope; the aforementioned Marnet explicitly conceives of the struggle for a better future of humankind not in abstract terms but in those of the concrete here and now.

Transit

Like Heisler, Seidler, the first-person narrator of Transit, is an unexceptional hero, yet he ultimately decides not to flee France after the Nazi invasion. Instead, he joins the Resistance movement—an act that enables him to find his true identity by breaking out of the vicious circle of hopelessness and despair in which the endangered fugitives from Hitler’s Germany are caught while they are waiting for their overseas passage in the port city of Marseilles. Whereas The Seventh Cross depicts deeds of defiance within Nazi Germany, Transit compellingly evokes the fate of those exiles who live in constant fear of being captured by the advancing German armies or the secret police. Their often futile efforts to obtain the necessary visas, transit permits, and other documents that would enable them to leave France bring them into contact with a complex and intransigent bureaucracy; indeed, this bureaucracy exerts a powerful influence on the refugees’ lives that is reminiscent of Kafka’s fictional universe. As one critic observed about Seidler, “He moves in a sort of miasma; [he is] enveloped in the mistrals of Marseilles spiritually as well as physically.” Consequently, “his strength of purpose is neutral; it lacks fire and drive.”

As a corollary to her unexceptional yet adventuresome male characters, Seghers introduces women figures who are usually content with traditional role models and who do not exhibit any emancipatory urge. Raddatz has noted that Seghers’s women are characterized by their lack of conspicuous female physical attributes; for all practical purposes, they have become desexed. Moreover, they tend to appear in subservient roles that do not permit them to participate actively in the affairs of men. Thus, Marie in The Revolt of the Fishermen suffers from casual sexual exploitation by a number of men; in The Seventh Cross, the narrator condescendingly mentions speeches by the Socialists August Bebel and Karl Liebknecht “that could even be read to women, while they were mending the truly devilish holes in all the socks.” In her dedicated but futile search for her husband—who had committed suicide in Paris—Marie Weidel in Transit represents yet another type of devoted woman in Seghers’s work.

Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen

In Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen, generally considered an exception in Seghers’s fiction in that the first-person narrator is largely identical with the author herself, a number of subtly differentiated female figures occupy center stage. In her Mexican exile, the narrator relives in memory an excursion with her girls’ school classmates that took place before World War I. The narrator is present in the story as both narrating subject and narrated object—a narrative stance that is designed to contrast the happy state of adolescence with the eventual fate of the girls. With the exception of the narrator, all the girls have died as a consequence of the Nazi terror and World War II. The initially harmonious relationship among the girls, exemplified by the intimacy between beautiful Marianne and her friend Leni, deteriorates with the advent of Nazism. Marianne, married to an officer of the SS, refuses to help Leni, whose husband opposes Hitler. Leni ultimately perishes in a concentration camp; Marianne, however, also dies prematurely, in a bombing raid on Mainz. Victims and oppressors, then, suffer the same fate—but neither victims nor oppressors are entirely defined in ideological or political terms. Rather, the girls’ future development is largely determined by their degree of humanity and understanding. It is Marianne’s indifference and lack of conscience that enable her to remain noncommittal and hostile in the face of a former friend’s real suffering.

In both its pattern of an antagonistic grouping of figures and its symbolic indication of hope by means of a surviving child from the ranks of the oppressed, Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen anticipates Seghers’s far more ambitious project, the novel The Dead Stay Young.

The Dead Stay Young

In this chronicle of Germany from the end of World War I to the end of World War II, Seghers provides a broad panorama of society, from workers and farmers on one hand to industrialists and aristocratic officers on the other. Several major figures dominate separate but parallel and occasionally intersecting plot lines. The author endeavored to impose a somewhat superficial thematic unity on the novel through the parallelism alluded to in the title. In the beginning, Erwin, the former soldier turned revolutionary, is murdered by counterrevolutionary officers; the same officer who has participated in Erwin’s murder orders the shooting of Erwin’s son, Hans, a soldier and anti-Nazi activist. Because of Hans’s likeness to his dead father, Hans appears to the officer as the dead person who had remained miraculously young. Thus, the title is indicative of the unbroken continuity of the revolutionary movement—a movement that, as the presumable survival of Hans’s unborn child demonstrates, cannot be annihilated by the representatives of the old order.

The novel is concerned with the depiction of the class struggle during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, and the characters are clearly divided between murderers and victims. It is surprising, then, that Seghers provides four fictional biographies of figures from the ranks of the former group as compared to only one account devoted to a figure from the latter. The biographies of the representatives of the aristocratic officer caste, the landed gentry, and the wealthy industrialists are supplemented by that of the small farmer Nadler, who serves as a willing and eager tool of his reactionary military superiors. These figures will eventually perish, but Marie, the mother of the murdered Erwin’s son, Hans, provides the biological link in the chain of revolutionaries. The main quality she imparts to her son is a basic humanity rather than any well-defined ideology. As a consequence, some East German critics objected to the absence in the novel of an upright, class-conscious, proletarian hero. This lack was particularly noticeable, they claimed, in view of the more than adequate representation of the reactionary camp. At the same time, the novel was poorly received by Western critics; Marcel Reich-Ranicki charged that, in The Dead Stay Young, Seghers had confined herself “to the transformation into fiction of the view concerning the epoch between the two world wars as it was to be found in Communist publications.”

There is no question that the novel offers a one-sided explanation of the disastrous developments in recent German history; Seghers’s intention was to instill in her readers a sense of hope, a faith in Socialist democracy as an alternative societal model that, at the time of her writing, seemed a viable possibility. Seghers’s works are, in fact, most convincing when they express the hope for a better, Socialist future that is to replace the old order of injustice and oppression. Perhaps it is an indication of the deficiencies of both GDR socialism and its cultural policies that the two sequels to The Dead Stay Young, Die Entscheidung (the decision) and Das Vertrauen (trust), both of which treat conditions in the GDR, may qualify as literary adaptations of officially sanctioned views, but hardly as great literary works.