Foreword in The Seventh Cross

Vonnegut wrote a Foreword in The Seventh Cross for a reprinting of the 1942 book by Anna Seghers by Monthly Review Press in 1987. It also features an afterword by Dorothy Rosenberg.

Summary

Anna Seghers, 1966

Vonnegut suggests an apt flag for the ordinary people of Europe during the twentieth century would feature a kitchen table with a few chairs, representing the center of their universe—anyone who can make it back to the table and chairs is safe. This novel is about such people in Germany during the 1930s, when new prisons, progenitors of the concentration camps, were being constructed outside many towns. It is the time when the disease of Nazism left behind mere politics for sheer madness. Vonnegut asked Heinrich Böll shortly before his death how much Germans knew about the death camps. He said everyone was aware of local ones, such as in this book, but not of the full scale "death factories".

However, it was the local camps that weakened the already fragile community immune system against evil that allowed for later horrors. Böll himself served in the German Army during the Second World War and afterward often seemed to be carrying the guilt from the war all by himself. Many other nations are now destroying "their dissidents, their immune systems against evil", with government violence, paving the way for greater crimes. With the modern threat of nuclear annihilation and large-scale genocide, mere conventional bombing and political repression hardly seem worth mentioning. Meanwhile, most of us sit at our kitchen tables with modest expectations and wait to hear the latest news.