Anna Seghers (German:[ˈanaˈzeːɡɛʁs]ⓘ; born Anna Reiling, 19 November 1900 – 1 June 1983), is the pseudonym of German writer Anna Reiling, who was notable for exploring and depicting the moral experience of the Second World War. Born into a Jewish family and married to a Hungarian Communist, Seghers escaped Nazi-controlled territory through wartime France. She was granted a visa and gained ship's passage to Mexico, where she lived in Mexico City (1941–47).
She returned to Europe after the war, living in West Berlin (1947–50), which was occupied by Allied forces. She eventually settled in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), where she worked on cultural and peace issues. She received numerous awards and in 1967 was nominated for the Nobel Prize by the GDR. She died and was buried in Berlin in 1983.
Seghers was born Anna Reiling in Mainz in 1900 into a Jewish family. She was called "Netty". Her father, Isidor Reiling, was a dealer in antiques and cultural artefacts.[2] In Cologne and Heidelberg she studied history, the history of art, and Chinese.
In 1925 she married László Radványi, also known as Johann Lorenz Schmidt, a Hungarian Communist and academic, thereby acquiring Hungarian citizenship.[2]
She joined the Communist Party of Germany in 1928, at a time when the Weimar Republic was moribund and soon to be replaced. Her 1932 novel, Die Gefährten was a prophetic warning of the dangers of Nazism, for which she was arrested by the Gestapo. In 1932, she formally left the Jewish community.[3]
One year later, she was granted an entry visa to Mexico and ship's passage. Settling in Mexico City, she founded the anti-fascist 'Heinrich-Heine-Klub', named after the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine. She also founded Freies Deutschland (Free Germany), an academic journal.
While still in Paris, in 1939, she had written The Seventh Cross. The novel is set in 1936 and describes the escape of seven prisoners from a concentration camp. It was published in English in the United States in 1942 and quickly adapted for an American movie of the same name. The Seventh Cross was one of the very few depictions of Nazi concentration camps, in either literature or the cinema, during World War II. In 1947 Seghers was awarded the Georg Büchner-Prize for this novel.
Seghers's best-known short story, the title of her collection in The Outing of the Dead Girls (1946), was written in Mexico. It was partially autobiographical, drawn from her reminiscence and reimagining of a pre-World War I class excursion on the Rhine river. She explores the actions of the protagonist's classmates in light of their decisions and ultimate fates during both world wars. In describing them, the German countryside, and her hometown Mainz, which was soon destroyed in the second war, Seghers expresses lost innocence and ponders the senseless injustices of war. She shows there is no escape from such loss, whether or not one sympathized with the Nazi Party. Other notable Seghers novels include Sagen von Artemis (1938) and The Ship of the Argonauts (1953), both based on myths.
In 1947, Seghers returned to Germany, settling in West Berlin, an enclave within the Soviet-controlled East Germany. She joined the Socialist Unity Party of Germany in the zone occupied by the Soviets. That year she was also awarded the Georg Büchner Prize for her novel Transit, written in German, and published in English in 1944.
In 1950, she moved to East Berlin, where she co-founded the Academy of the Arts of the GDR, and became a member of the World Peace Council.
In 1951, Seghers received the first National Prize of the GDR and the Stalin Peace Prize. She received an honorary doctorate from the University of Jena in 1959. Seghers was nominated for the 1967 Nobel Prize in Literature by the German Academy of Arts.[5] In 1981, she was made an honorary citizen of her native town Mainz.[6][7] She died in Berlin on 1 June 1983 and is buried there.
Her novel published as Transit (1944) in English, set in Marseilles, was adapted for a 2018 film of the same name by German director Christian Petzold. It was set in contemporary Marseilles, again a center of refugees.
Anna Seghers's earlier works are typically attributed to the New Objectivity movement. She also made a number of important contributions to Exilliteratur, including her novels Transit and The Seventh Cross. Her later novels, published in the GDR, are often associated with socialist realism. A number of her novels have been adapted into films in Germany. In 2021, a collection of her short stories was published in English by NYRB Classics.[8]
1928 – Aufstand der Fischer von St. Barbara – Revolt of the Fishermen of Santa Barbara (novel)
1943 – Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen – "The Excursion of the Dead Girls" (story) (inGerman Women Writers of the Twentieth Century, Pergamon Press, 1978)
Anna Seghers: Eine Biographie in Bildern, edited by Frank Wagner, Ursula Emmerich, Ruth Radvanyi; with an essay by Christa Wolf, Berlin: Aufbau, 2000
Helen Fehervary, Anna Seghers: The Mythic Dimension. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001.
Anna Seghers: The Challenge of History, edited by Helen Fehervary, Christiane Zehl Romero, Amy Kepple Strawser. Boston: Brill, 2020.
Writers on the Left in an Age of Extremes: Edgell Rickword, Anna Seghers, Carlo Levi, by Greta Sykes and David Morgan. London: Socialist History Society, 2021.
