Quotes from Anna Seghers

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.

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.

Since the same ruthless fist that had suppressed justice had also suppressed a few useless old customs,

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.

Um das zu sehen, worauf es ankommt, muss man bleiben wollen. Unmerklich verhüllten sich alle Städte für die, die sie nur zum Durchziehen brauchen.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Young Helwig was in good standing as a member of the Hitler Youth and at the garden school and he did well everywhere. He was a strong, honest, handy boy. He was sure the men who were imprisoned in the Westhofen concentration camp belonged in that place just as much as crazy people belonged in an insane asylum.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Such lies were a lot better, less hurtful than the truth would have been.

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.

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.

Während die Starken sich ruhig einmal irren können, ohne etwas zu verlieren, weil selbst die mächtigsten Menschen noch Menschen sind - ja sogar ihre Irrtümer machen sie nur noch menschlicher -, darf sich, wer sich als Allmacht aufspielt, niemals irren, weil es entweder Allmacht ist oder gar nichts.

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.

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.

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.

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.