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Blood Money

Blood Money

by Anna Seghers, translated from the German by Lucy Jones

$16.95
$16.95
Available as E-Book German Literature
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The October 2026 selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club

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.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9798896230489
Pages: 168
Publication Date:

Praise

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

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

Written in the early 1930s as the Nazis rose to power . . . [Blood Money] chronicles the moral unraveling of a small village on the Rhine . . . Skillfully translated by Jones, it’s a striking examination of how a democratic society surrendered itself to authoritarianism through ordinary human passion rather than extraordinary evil.
—Publishers Weekly

Seghers was concerned with major questions, and she pursued those questions in her fiction relentlessly. What does fascism do to a person's soul? she asks again and again.
—Kirkus Reviews

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