Blood Money

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.

Anna Seghers (1900-1983) was born in Mainz, Germany, into an upper-middle-class Jewish family. She published her first story in 1924 and received the Kleist Prize for her first novel, The Revolt of the Fishermen, in 1929. After World War II she moved to East Berlin, where she became an emblematic figure of East German letters, actively championing the work of younger writers from her position as president of the Writers Union and publishing at a steady pace. Transit, The Seventh Cross, and The Dead Girls' Class Trip: Selected Stories are also available from NYRB Classics.

Lucy Jones is a literary translator and writer who lives in Berlin. She has translated works by Ronald M. Schernikau, Charlotte Gneuß, Brigitte Reimann, Theresia Enzensberger, and others. Her writing has been published in Berlin's SAND Journal, Pigeon Papers, Litro, 3: AM Magazine, and STAT(R)REC. She is a cofounder of Transfiction, a collective of translators in Berlin.