The Dead Girls’ Class Trip

German writer Seghers (1900–1983) was among the first writers to address the rise and aftermath of Nazism with works such as Transit, a legacy well documented in this clear-eyed collection. The stories straddle history—“The Square” follows the family of communist leader Ernst Thälmann after he was arrested by the Gestapo—and myth—“Tales of Artemis” features an old hunter sharing stories of seeing a goddess in the woods and of a boy who strayed fatally into their hunting ground. “The Ship of the Argonauts” combines both themes, describing a man’s return home with his Golden Fleece to a land made strange, a clear metaphor for survivors of the Holocaust. In the explicit “A Man Becomes a Nazi,” a desperate outsider is seduced by the promise of power, and “The End” follows two men—one a survivor of the concentration camps, the other his jailer—as they reencounter each other in the countryside. Seghers’s masterly title story, written near the end of the war, casts an idyllic school outing in a dark pall, anticipating the fates of the innocent children. The result is classic European storytelling at its most potent. (June)