Blood Money

By Anna Seghers
Translated by Lucy Jones

“Anna Seghers was an admirable woman in many ways, but above all she was a remarkable humanist: she became a model of cultural resistance and ideological struggle who cut across borders, and who, still today, thanks to her work, transcends time and lives on in our memory. Anna Seghers’ novels don’t only recount stories of terror, escape, and oppression; they are a call to compassion and solidarity.” —Fernanda Melchor

“Like Dante, Leo Tolstoy, and more recently Nadine Gordimer, Seghers was an epic writer who wrote against the grain of those in power. Her works evoke the spirit of her time in ways that most histories and documentaries cannot. Anyone who wants to know how people seeking justice can face adversity and still retain hope should read her books.” —Helen Fehervary, Jacobin

“In this masterful novel, Anna Seghers examines how the private decisions of numerous individuals lead to fatal political consequences. She is that rare author whose books never age.” —Jenny Erpenbeck

A chilling narrative about early Nazism in Germany through the eyes of a wrongfully accused young man, this 1930s novel provides a prescient look at the ways ordinary people are seduced by fascism, to the point of betraying their neighbors.

It’s the summer of 1932, and Johann Schulz is accused of killing a police officer during a demonstration. Wanted for murder, Schulz leaves the city to seek shelter with his relatives in a small village on the Rhine. But the Nazis are beginning to recruit there, and it’s only a matter of time before the price on his head is too great a temptation for the villagers.

Blood Money, a novel of suspense and political upheaval, tracks the nascent rise of the Hitler movement in a German village: the old farmers disinterested, then capitulating; the young entranced by the promise of action and the rare chance at advancement. Anna Seghers began writing Blood Money in 1932 and completed it in exile a year later, after she was blacklisted in Germany and forced to leave. In this prescient novel, Seghers’s dispassionate realism opens our eyes to the massive dimensions of the impending political and moral collapse.

Paperback
168 pages
NYRB Classics, 2026
Originally Written in 1932-1933
5 x 8 inches
ISBN 9798896230489
Fiction