While the normality of life amidst the tyranny of fascism caught my attention in Anna Seghers’ novels, I also noticed how Seghers, in The Seventh Cross, details the ways that youth become indoctrinated into fascism and oppressive political ideologies. There are multiple scenes in The Seventh Cross that involve the Hitler Youth or young men joining the SA and SS, specifically George Heisler’s younger brother Heini. 

Early during his escape, George hides in a yard in Buchenau as pair of women do laundry. He overhears them talking, and as the women work on the clothesline, “as SA officer comes out of the house” and chastises them for doing such work with an escapee from Westhofen on the loose. The younger woman tells him, “Oh well, there’s always someting going on. . . . What about the beets? And the grapes, the wine? And the laundry?” Amidst everything, she asks, who will take care of the day-to-day, the quotidian acts of mere existence.

The man runs out of the yaerd in search of George, and as the older woman locks the gate, a group of Hitler Youth, led by her grandson Fritz, approaches. He asks his grandmother to allow the other Hitler Youth to come into the yard and house to search for George, and she denies them, yet they step over her laundry basket and parade through the house, blowing whistles and shouting as George hides outisde. While they are in the house, the woman turns towards her daughter-in-law Anna and tells her how much she has done for her son’s children following the death of their mother. She tells Anna they have learned a lot from her.

However, all of the changes in the right direction got undercut with the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. Anna turns to the older woman, points to the Hitler Youth, and says, “Yes but then this happened. . . . This has gotten in the way, Mother. And the children I straightened out, sweating blood in the process, they’re now the same impudent brats they were all along from the start, and Albrecht [her husband] is again the same old beast of a man.” She concludes by questing why George had to come to Bucheneau and get them involved instead of just hiding in the marsh.

George and the women hear a howl, and “[a] crowd of Hitler Youths, old women, farmers, and SA men stormed into the farmyard” proclaiming they caught the escaped man. Fritz runs up and tells the women they caught him next door at the Wurms’ and that they broke his glasses, adding, “He won’t need them anymore.” Anna stands in a daze, but when she come out of it, she goes to the gate and looks at the car where they are placing the man, “[t]hen she turned away, crossed herself, and ran into the house.” Her mother-in-law does the same, leaving the laundry basket in the yard.

Spencer Tracey starred in the 1944 film adaptation of The Seventh Cross and one of the only clips I have been able to find online of the film is the one discussed above. It is a pretty one-to-one adaptation, cut down some for length. It highlights everything I have been writing about so far. For example, when Anna and her mother-in-law come out of the house and the SA man approaches them, Anna angrily responds to him telling him that while they’re searching for George and he other escapees the grapes are rotting on the vine, both literally and figuratively.

Society’s rotting appears when the Hitler Youth troop rush into the yard and start to barge into the house. Anna grabs a hold of what appears to Fritz’s arm, and he fights to get free to go into the house and search for George. Anna’s mother-in-law tells her to let him go, and she returns folding the laundry as if all of this is normal. When the boy rushes in to tell they caught the man, the clip ends. The Hitler Youth enthusiastically take their pursuit of George as a duty. They don’t laugh like the boy at the 1939 Pro American Rally who laughs as German American Bund supporters drag Isadore Greenbaum off the stage. Yet, they have the same energy, buying in wholeheartedly to the Nazi ideology they learn as members of the Hitler Youth.

Later, as the Nazis have his house under surveillance, his mother sits up waiting to see if her son will eventually show up seeking help. However, while her older son comforts her, Heini views George’s escape as an affront to the regime and seeks to use George as a way to prove his loyalty to the Nazi party. The older brother listens to Heini as his language announces how “[h]e was participating in the hunt as if it didn’t mean anything to him at all.” Heini sees it as a way “to prove to the Hitler Youths on the street and the men, too, that George means nothing to him” even though he was George’s favorite brother and Heini “clung to George like a burr.” Like Fritz, Heini buys into the ideology, even to the point that he would be fine with turning George in to the Gestapo or SA and returning him to Westhofen where he would be tortured and possibly killed.

Others, such as he Fieldlers, realize the peer pressure pull of society, and while they didn’t want children at first because they didn’t have any work and “felt they were intended for other things,” their views shifted. With the rise of the Nazis, they decided not to have “children in the Third Reich because eventually those children would be put into brown shirts and drilled to become soldiers,” they would be enlisted into the Hitler Youth. They knew, no matter what they did, that the ideology would seep in somehow, infecting their nonexistent children. So, rather that having their children indoctrinated into hate, they chose to not have any children and to fight back against the Nazis through their actions.

We know how easy it is for ideas to transmit to children. I’ve written about this countless times in relation to slavery and Nazism. The Seventh Cross continues that discussion, providing countless moments where children and individuals get sucked into violent, fascist ideology. In this moment, it’s important for us to notice these moments and to work against them, leading people away from fascism, not towards it. What are your thoughts? As always, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @silaslapham.