Blood Money

A chilling novel about early Nazism in Germany through the eyes of a wrongfully accused young man, this novel from the 1930s 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 Yohann 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. Anna Seghers began the novel in 1932 and completed it in exile a year later, after she was blacklisted in Germany and forced to leave. Her prescience about the destructive power of the ascending party is expressed by her characteristically dispassionate and direct description of the way things were, as if this sea change in society were part of a natural process: the old farmers disinterested, then capitulating; the young entranced by the promise of action and the rare chance at advancement.