NYRB Classics Reissues Anna Seghers's 'Blood Money,' Completing Her Manhunt Trilogy in English

NYRB Classics has released a new English translation of Anna Seghers's 1933 novel 'Blood Money,' making all three of her manhunt thrillers available again. The German Jewish Communist writer, born in Mainz in 1900, fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and spent the war years in France and Mexico before settling in East Germany, where she died in 1983. Her work faded in the West during the Cold War, but after 1989 readers rediscovered it, and NYRB Classics began publishing new translations in 2013, including 'The Seventh Cross' and 'Transit.' 'Blood Money' follows a young Communist fugitive, Johann, hiding in a Nazi-infested village in 1932. The translation is by Lucy Jones, who took over from the late Margot Bettauer Dembo. Seghers's novels blend journalistic realism with mythic allusion and suspense, and her Communist affiliations explain her eventual eclipse in the West. The Seventh Cross became a best-seller in 1942 and was adapted into a 1944 film starring Spencer Tracy, directed by Fred Zinnemann. Seghers's FBI file, nearly a thousand pages, documents surveillance during her time in Mexico. Her later career in East Germany saw her serve as president of the Writers' Union from 1952 to 1978, shielding colleagues like Bertolt Brecht, Heiner Müller, and Christa Wolf. NYRB's story collection includes 'The Dead Girls' Class Trip' and other works.