In her novel of post WWI novel Germany, Anna Segher follows the frantic lives of seven men, political prisoners escaped from a Nazi camp. Segher portrays the insidious effects of the regime - the generational divide, the fear that replaces domestic normalcy, the dogma of eugenics - in a matter of fact prose effective in recreating a tone of oppressive brutality. The musings of the fugitives and the people they encounter drift dreamily between insight and despair, but without the power of self determination, it is clear that that consciousness betrays a collective apathy prefiguring the Holocaust.

"Only when nothing at all is possible any longer does life pass by like a shadow. But the periods where everything is possible contain all of life - and of destruction." -- Anna Segher