‘A sound, thoughtful and thoroughly interesting work… written with force and fury’ New York Times

“When a good man, who has believed in the goodness of other men, comes to experience—and to acknowledge fully to himself—the depths of depravity and cruelty, of viciousness and animalism, of which corrupted men are capable, his revulsion is catastrophic.” – ALBERT MALTZ

Despite being decorated with a German Service Cross, Willi Wegler is inwardly sickened by both Hitler’s genocidal war and the complicity of his fellow citizens in Third Reich brutalities. Wracked by guilt, he suddenly betrays his country in a profound gesture of protest and self-sacrifice: during the course of an air raid, he fashions an enormous arrow out of hay in an open field, then ignites it as a flaming signal to direct British bombers to the site of the factory where he works – an act that cannot fail to precipitate a series of dramatic events.

The Cross and the Arrow – first published in 1944, during the latter stages of the war it describes – portrays a man’s struggle to retain his dignity in defiance of state-sponsored cruelty and explores the role and responsibility of the individual in the face of tragic global events. In its examination of an enemy’s complex heroism, it provides a life-affirming message of humanity’s ultimate capacity for good.

“Maltz wanted the novel to send messages about the racist history of the United States. He hoped the emphasis given to Third Reich chattel slaves in Wegler’s awakening would prompt stateside readers to compare the Nazi system with America’s own apartheid. Progressives like Maltz were keenly aware, for example, that Hitler studied American lynching and admired the racial terrors of the Jim Crow South, and that in significant ways it was Birmingham that taught Berlin. Abjuring simple formulae to instead deal profoundly with central issues of humanity, Albert Maltz produced an absorbing, intensely dramatic philosophical novel about the soul of man—its ghastly corruption and its capacity for redemption. The “motor power” of the story, Maltz asserted, “is supplied by a moral quest.” – PATRICK CHURA

Contains an introduction by Patrick Chura, Distinguished Professor, University of Akron

Find out more about award-winning short story writer and respected novelist Albert Maltz

Part of Calder Publications imprint