Awarded the Kleist Prize. With this story, Anna Seghers made a name for herself in Germany in 1928. She crafted her famous narrative about the uprising of Breton fishermen as a grand parable of a defeat from which hope emerges. The longer the uprising lasts and the more hopeless it seems, the more contradictions and conflicts tear at the lives of the islanders: distrust, cowardice, and betrayal, but also loyalty and strength come to the fore. With a small, rusty steamer, Johann Hull travels from Margareten Island off the Breton coast to St. Barbara Island. The fishermen there are dissatisfied: their earnings are being cut. Should they go on strike? Hull encourages them to believe in their own strength. For the publication of this story, her first book release, Anna Seghers used her pseudonym without a first name.