BLOOD MONEY

In the early 1930s, a small German village contemplates the appeal of the rising Nazi party.

Seghers’ latest novel to appear in English translation provides an ensemble portrait of a small, struggling village whose inhabitants can just barely eke out a living on their farms. When one man installs a new pump on his land—his daughter isn’t strong enough to tote water all the way from the well and no one else is available to perform the task—the decision is potentially ruinous: How will he make the payments? At the same time, a group of strapping young men has been demanding donations for a nascent political party. Seghers, who apparently wrote the book contemporaneously with the events depicted (she fled Germany in 1933 after being blacklisted for her own views), effectively describes the generational breakdown at play, where fathers try to restrain their sons—equally drawn by the high-quality boots and belts worn by Nazi party members as by the promises they make—from joining up. The fathers just aren’t sure where all this is going. When the Nazis come to Rifke’s house, for example, requesting a donation he can ill afford, he reflects, “If he gave them money, it might harm him today. If he gave them nothing, it might harm him tomorrow.” Meanwhile, a young man has shown up, asking for work, and one by one, the villagers discover he’s wanted in town for the murder of a policeman, and a major reward is being offered for information on his whereabouts. In this book, Seghers is at her best when she leans into a realist granularity in her depictions of the villagers and their brutal lives. But in more than a few moments, she slips toward the grotesque, as in her treatment of the “slightly feeble-minded” wife of Schuechlin, one of the villagers. And the fight scenes—between the young Nazis and their rivals in the local Red Front chapter—are wooden and stiff. Still, there’s much to admire here, and only a bit that fails to land.

An effective depiction of the appeals of fascism in an area suffering from scarcity and lack of opportunity.