Anna Seghers > Quotes

“What can I expect here? You know the fairy tale about the man who died, don’t you? He was waiting in Eternity to find out what the Lord had decided to do with him. He waited and waited, for one year, ten years, a hundred years. He begged and pleaded for a decision. Finally he couldn’t bear the waiting any longer. Then they said to him: ‘What do you think you’re waiting for? You’ve been in Hell for a long time already.”
― Anna Seghers, Transit

“When you're young and healthy you can recover quickly from a defeat. But betrayal is different—it paralyzes you.”
― Anna Seghers, Transit

“Not only can what others are suffering be a consolation while we are suffering, but even knowing what others suffered long ago can be consoling.”
― Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross

“For the first time back then, I thought about everything seriously. The past and the future, both equally unknowable, and also this ongoing situation that the consulates call "transitory" but that we know in everyday language as "the present.”
― Anna Seghers, Transit

“Even if they were to shoot me, they'd never be able to eradicate me. I feel I know this country, its work, its people, its hills and mountains, its peaches and its grapes too well. If you bleed to death on familiar soil, something of you will continue to grow like the sprouts that come up after bushes and trees have been cut down.”
― Anna Seghers, Transit

“They didn’t want to have any children in the Third Reich because eventually those children would be put into brown shirts and drilled to become soldiers.”
― Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross

“Un po' di felicità quotidiana, subito, invece di quella terribile, spietata lotta per la felicità assoluta di chissà quale umanità della quale lui forse non avrebbe nemmeno fatto parte.”
― Anna Seghers, Das siebte Kreuz

“Such lies were a lot better, less hurtful than the truth would have been.”
― Anna Seghers, Transit

“Und wenn er auch nur noch die Kraft für eine einzige winzig kleine Bewegung hatte, auf die Freiheit hin, wie sinnlos und nutzlos diese Bewegung auch sein mochte, er wollte diese Bewegung doch noch gemacht haben.”
― Anna Seghers, Das siebte Kreuz

“Death was just as close, but not behind him; it was everywhere. It was inescapable; he felt death’s physical presence—as if death itself were something alive. Like in the old pictures, a creature that can hide behind a bed of asters or behind a baby carriage and can come out and touch you.”
― Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross

“Anna,” the old woman said, “don’t take everything so much to heart. Learn from me. There are things in this world you can change. And there are things in this world you can’t change. Those things you have to put up with.”
― Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross

“Your only problem is that you can’t put up with things. But there are certain things you just have to put up with, to endure. Because eventually they’ll pass.”
― Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross

“Chance, if you let it take over, is not blind at all, as they say, but clever, even witty. You just have to trust in it completely. If you interfere and try to help it along, then things get bungled and chance mistakenly gets the blame. If you just leave everything to it and yield to it completely, then it usually arrives at the right outcome quickly, unpredictably, and directly.”
― Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross

“And all the time they threatened me with everything they could possibly threaten me with. All that was lacking was hellfire. They really wanted to make me think they were the Last Judgment. But they are not the slightest bit all-knowing. All they know is what you tell them.”
― Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross

“Then I walked down the Cours Belsunce. The nets were stretched out to dry. A couple of women mending them looked quite lost in the huge square. I had never seen them doing this before. I'm sure that I haven't seen most of the really important things that happen in this city. To see the things that matter, you have to feel that you want to stay. Cities shroud themselves from those who're just passing through. I picked my way carefully among the nets. The first stores were just opening, and the first newspaper boys were yelling the headlines.

The newspaper boys, the fishermen's wives on the Belsunce, the shopkeepers opening their stores, the workers going to work the early shift - they were all part of the masses who would never leave no matter what happened. The thought of leaving this place was as unlikely to occur to them as to a tree or a clump of grass.”
― Anna Seghers, Transit

“Once, back then, a young riverman had even publicly cursed the camp. He was immediately arrested and locked up in the camp for several weeks so that he saw firsthand what was going on inside there. When he got out, he looked strange and didn’t answer a single question people asked him. He eventually found work on a barge, and later, his relatives said, he moved to Holland for good—a story that astounded the entire village back then.”
― Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross

“The man who was going to sound out Roeder was just about their only mainstay at Pokorny. Was it permissible to risk one man’s life for another’s? Under what conditions was it permissible? Hermann weighed it all in his mind, back and forth, and came to the conclusion that yes, it was permissible. Not only permissible, but necessary.”
― Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross

“Mothers, justifiably fearful for every pfennig and always asking, What’s it for? willingly gave up their sons and parts of their sons as long as they kept on playing this march. Once the music has faded away, they’d ask softly, What for? What for?”
― Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross

“Probably a lot like what happened last summer when one of those poor devils tried to leave and they shot him—and the siren kept on howling even after he was already dead. There never used to be shenanigans like that before around here. Why did they have to plop this concentration camp down right here, of all places, right in front of our noses? On the other hand, at least people in the area were earning some money now, whereas before they’d had to skimp and scrape for a living, taking every last little thing to sell at the market.”
― Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross

“What consequences can there be for a dead man they throw from one grave into another? Not even a tombstone as tall as a house on his final resting place would be of any consequence to the dead man.”
― Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross

“Wenn ein noch so winziger Streich gelang gegen die Allmacht des Feindes, dann war schon alles gelungen.”
― Anna Seghers, Das siebte Kreuz

“Wir fühlten alle, wie tief und furchtbar die äußeren Mächten in den Mensch hineingreifen können, bis in sein Innerstes, aber wir fühlten auch, dass es im Innersten etwas gab, was unangreifbar war und unverletzbar.”
― Anna Seghers, Das siebte Kreuz

“He could sink down and go under in this bog before he’d even be able to get away from here. The dry brush resisted his fingers, which by now were bloodless, slippery, and icy cold. He felt as if he were sinking ever more quickly and deeper; it seemed to him that he should already have been swallowed up. Although he had escaped to avoid certain death—there was no doubt that they would have killed all of them within the next few days—dying in the swamp seemed to him quite simple and not frightening.”
― Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross

“The fiancé was in the same SA division, not because he couldn’t live without a brown shirt, but because he wanted to be able to work, to get married, to inherit his parents’ farm, and to live in peace, which he would certainly have been prevented from doing otherwise.”
― Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross

“The Wanted poster had been based on the Westhofen intake records of December ’34, with the exception of the description of the clothing. But except for the jacket, the guard thought, nothing about this man coincided with the specifications he’d been given. This fellow could have been the fugitive’s father; the wanted man in the picture was his own age, a young fellow with a smooth, bold face, while this man here had a flat face with a thick nose and puffy lips. He waved them on. “Heil Hitler!”
― Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross

“Es ist mir ohnehin zutiefst unverständlich, was verheiratete oder glücklich liebende Leute auf einem Tanzfest oder in einer Diskothek suchen, wo der ganze Reiz solcher Veranstaltungen doch ausschließlich darin besteht, daß man nicht weiß, in wessen Gesellschaft man sie verlassen wird oder ob die Jagd ergebnislos bleibt.”
― Anna Seghers, Transit

“... Noch hatte keine Schuld ihre Helligkeit getrübt, keine Ahnung, dass das Herz unter dem Druck des Lebens sich auf allerlei einlassen muss, was es dann später vorgibt, nicht begriffen zu haben- aber warum hat es dann so bang und hastig geschlagen?-, [...]”
― Anna Seghers, Das siebte Kreuz

“Wait, I thought to myself! He wants to wait until everything that once was dear to him is trampled under foot.”
― Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross

“Of course, it was possible that Fiedler might die more quickly and more terribly than they had feared in the struggles he’d gotten involved in. Only in times when nothing at all is possible anymore does life pass by like a shadow. But those times when everything becomes possible again contain all of life as well as death and destruction.”
― Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross

“We all felt how profoundly and how terribly outside forces can reach into a human being, to his innermost self. But we also sensed that in that innermost core there was something that was unassailable and inviolable.”
― Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross