Signed, 1949, Anna Seghers, Die Toten bleiben jung, First Edition

Anna Seghers (born Anna Reiling, 1900 – 1983), is the pseudonym of a German writer notable for exploring and depicting the moral experience of the Second World War.

Die Toten bleiben jung describes the lives of a group of people related to each other by their involvement in a political crime at the end of World War I. The novel traces the lives of the perpetrators and of the lover of the victim, a young communist, including that of their children. Doing so, Segher’s sketches a panorama of German society during the Weimar republic and the years of the Nazi state. The novel ends in the final days of World War II.