Das siebte Kreuz Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“For the first time since the escape Fahrenberg realized that he wasn’t pursuing one single man whose features he knew, whose strength was exhaustible, but rather a faceless, inexhaustible, inestimable power. But he couldn’t bear to think such a thought for longer than a few minutes.”
― 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

“God had nothing to do with it, or only as much as He has something to do with everything. It was all just as I imagined it would be. A huge lot of hocus-pocus. For hours they put me to the acid test. Except I never imagined that they would sit there and write down all the rubbish I was spouting, and that after that I had to write my name under it, saying that I myself had really spouted all that.”
― Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross

“All this time you’ve been saying, there’s nothing you can do to combat it, that you’re powerless to prevail against it, that you just have to wait it out. Wait, I thought to myself, he wants to wait until they’ve trampled everything that was precious to him. Please understand me. I wasn’t even twenty when I left my parents to marry you, and I left my home back then because I was repelled by everything there, my father, my brothers, the silence in our living room every evening. But it’s been just as silent here in our place recently as it used to be back home.”
― 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

“But there were also other voices among the powerful in Westhofen. They thought the current state of affairs there was unbearable. Fahrenberg had to be dismissed as soon as possible, and with him also the clique he had brought with him or had gathered about him. It was not that those who felt this way wanted to see an end of the hell and a beginning of justice at Westhofen. Rather, they wanted there to be order even in hell.”
― Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross

“Wallau, covered with blood, was sitting propped against the wall. Zillich looked calmly at him from the doorway. A bit of light above Zillich’s shoulder, a tiny blue corner of autumn, told Wallau for the last time that the structure of the world was intact and would remain so through whatever struggles might come. Zillich stood there rigid for one moment. Never before had anyone looked at him with so much composure, so much dignity. This is death, Wallau thought. Slowly Zillich pulled the door closed behind him.”
― 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

“How empty the meadow was now! Eugenia’s heart contracted. Even though she didn’t care all that much for Ernst, and the three days he grazed his sheep there resulted only in more work for her and stupid talk. How quickly the little forest had swallowed them all up; maybe they were already coming out into the open on the other side. But the meadow would remain empty till next year! That reminded her of all sorts of things that had come and gone, and once they were gone, nothing was as it had been before. Instead there was emptiness and silence, enough to make you weep.”
― 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

“Put the cup next to your bed. You don’t have to worry about whether he’s coming or not. Don’t even think about him. After all, you have the three of us.” The older one listened to him, still looking out at the street. He was astonished at the language Heini, George’s favorite little brother, had acquired. He was participating in the hunt as if it didn’t mean anything to him at all. Wants to prove to the Hitler Youths on the street and the men, too, that George means nothing to him, even though in the old days he’d clung to George like a burr.”
― 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

“His eyebrows twitched in time to the march. His eyes glittered. Was his son among the marchers? This was a march that roiled up the people, made their spines tingle and their eyes glow. What magic was this, composed in equal parts of ancient memory and total forgetting? From the way they acted you might think that the last war these people had fought was the happiest of undertakings and had brought them only joy and prosperity”
― Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross

“True, all the streets and roads are very clean, and the school has been freshly painted, but why does that cow have to pull a wagon even though she’s pregnant? Why is that child who has filled her apron with grass looking around in fear? And, of course, if you’re driving through or looking down from an airplane, you can’t see farmer Wurz sitting on his milking stool in the dark barn.”
― Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross

“Since the same ruthless fist that had suppressed justice had also suppressed a few useless old customs,”
― Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross

“Even if he had only enough strength left to take one tiny step toward freedom, no matter how ridiculous and useless the step might be, he was going to take it.”
― Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross

“His few friends and his former teachers might be watched, as well as his brothers and those dearest to him. The entire city, a dragnet. And he was already in it. He had to slip though its meshes. But by now he was really done in.”
― 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

“When I was still a living man in the life that I lived, I met a young fellow. His name was George. I latched on to him. We shared our pain and joy. He was much younger than I was. I valued everything about young George. In that young man I found again everything I prized in life. Now he has as little to do with me as a living man does with a dead one. May he think of me from time to time, if he has the time for it. I know that the living are very busy.”
― Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross

“All those boys and girls out there, once they’d passed through the Hitler Youth and the Labor Service and the army, they were like the children in the saga, children who’d been raised by wild animals to rip apart and devour their own mothers.”
― Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross

“If you’re fighting and are killed, another takes up the banner and he fights and is killed too, and the next one takes up the flag and dies too. That’s the natural sequence of events, for you don’t get anything for nothing. But what if there’s no one there who wants to take up the flag because no one knows its meaning?”
― Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross

“Now we were all lost, we thought. They’d kill Wallau now, the way they’d murdered all the others. In the first month after Hitler took power they’d murdered hundreds of our leaders in all parts of the country. Every month more were killed. Some were publicly executed; some tortured to death in the concentration camps. They exterminated an entire generation. That’s what we were thinking about on that terrible morning. And we said it out loud then for the first time, that if we were all exterminated and cut down in such great numbers, we would perish without leaving any who could follow in our footsteps.”
― Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross

“She had said, “Those people at the Gestapo, they know everything about a person.” Mrs. Wallau had said, “That’s all exaggeration. They only know what they’ve been told.”
― 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