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“The End,” like the other tales presented in this issue, represents an aspect of Anna Seghers's complex literary response to the Holocaust and her anticipation of the cultural ambiguities of an impending postfascist Germany. If the two other tales in the collection in which “The End” appeared in 1946 with the Aurora Press—one of the many publishing houses founded by German antifascist émigrés in the exile period—dealt largely with the National Socialist dictatorship from the vantage point of its victims, this story turns its focus to the mentality of the perpetrators. “The End” is a fugitive narrative that inverts Seghers's best-selling novel of 1942, The Seventh Cross. There, the Communist prisoner Georg Heisler's escape from the Westhofen concentration camp is framed as a symbol of the ultimately fragile and transitory character of Germany's regime of fascist terror, an escape assisted at every step by acts of daring and resistance on the part of everyday Germans whose quotidian acts of decency are portrayed as the fundament of a protean antifascist solidarity. “The End,” on the other hand, as the title suggests, depicts the flight and suicide of the former camp guard Zillich as a narrative of retribution. Zillich appears as a man who has, as it were, outlived his own death, a useless remainder of a defeated National Socialism, and his demise stands for the punishment of perpetrators and the possibility of a more just society in National Socialism's wake. Nevertheless, the uncanny tonality of the text, borrowing from the traditions of German Romanticism, belies the optimism of this message, hinting that the social conditions of fascism and the attitudes, attachments, and desires that sustained Hitler's regime may prove more enduring than the National Socialist state itself.