[D66] Anna Seghers, a Writer Who Defended the Wretched of the Earth

[R.O.]

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/11/anna-seghers-jewish-writer-germany-holocaust


  Anna Seghers, a Writer Who Defended the Wretched of the Earth

Born this day in 1900, Anna Seghers was one of Germany’s great modern 
writers, an internationalist and anti-fascist through the darkest hours 
in German history. Her works are a monument to the dignity of the 
oppressed.
By Helen Fehervary

Anna Seghers in Paris, circa 1940. (Archive, Aufbau Verlag, Berlin)

Anna Seghers was one of Germany’s greatest writers — and 120 years since 
her birth, her works are still of enormous contemporary relevance. She 
chronicled the lives of the enslaved and oppressed, indigenous peoples, 
blacks and other people of color — those whom Frantz Fanon called “the 
wretched of the earth.” A lifelong internationalist, the opening lines 
of her 1944 novel /Transit/ 
<https://theamericanreader.com/bookcase/transit/>, about refugees 
escaping European fascism, could speak just as well to the dangers 
encountered by migrants crossing borders today.

Born at the turn of the twentieth century, Seghers hailed from Mainz, a 
city whose radical past stretches back to its Jacobin Club and its 
declaration of the first democratic state on German soil in 1792–93. 
Indeed, the spirit of Jacobinism would pervade Seghers’s life. This was 
visible both through the influence that Enlightenment and French 
revolutionary ideals had on her, and the way she realized them as a 
lifelong socialist.


  Radical Origins

Born Netty Reiling, Seghers was the only child of Isidor and Hedwig. Her 
father owned an art and antiquities firm with his brother, while her 
mother — a founding member of the Mainz Jewish Women’s League — came 
from a renowned family of Frankfurt jewelers.

Seghers was raised in the traditions of Judaism and the Enlightenment. 
She later severed her religious ties, joining those whom Isaac Deutscher 
called “non-Jewish Jews,” like Baruch Spinoza, Karl Marx, Rosa 
Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, and Sigmund Freud. Yet she never renounced 
Judaism’s ethical values — and her works abounded with allusions to 
Jewish history and Jewish themes.

In 1920, she enrolled at Heidelberg University, as one of few women 
students. There, she took courses in history, philosophy, sociology, 
sinology, and art history, and in 1924, she completed her doctoral 
dissertation on “Jews and Judaism in the Works of Rembrandt.”

In Heidelberg, Seghers came into contact with sociologist Karl Mannheim 
and László Radványi — both members of the Budapest Sunday Circle led by 
György Lukács and the poet Béla Balázs. Active in the Hungarian Soviet 
Republic of 1919, after its defeat, these young intellectuals fled to 
Heidelberg via Vienna, to escape the anti-communist, antisemitic “White 
Terror.” From them, Seghers learned of the Sunday Circle’s philosophical 
discussions, their experiences during the Soviet Republic, and Lukács’s 
ethical principles and aesthetic theories — leaving a lasting influence 
on her work.

In 1925, Seghers married Rádványi, and they moved to Berlin, where they 
had two children. Radványi sought academic employment, but as a 
foreigner — to wit, a Jew from Eastern Europe — this proved impossible. 
 From 1927, he directed the Berlin Marxist Workers’ School (MASCH). Its 
lecturers included Lukács, Balázs, Karl Korsch, John Heartfield, Wilhelm 
Reich, Walter Gropius, other Bauhaus members (supplying it with office 
furniture and classroom chairs), and even Albert Einstein, who gave two 
lectures on “What a Worker Must Know about the Theory of Relativity.”

Soon, MASCH students numbered up to twenty-five thousand per year. As 
ever more workers became unemployed, classes were also held in the back 
rooms of taverns — with the price of a glass of beer serving as tuition. 
Under Radványi’s leadership, the MASCH provided the model for thirty 
more schools in Germany as well as others in Zurich, Vienna, and 
Amsterdam. In 1933, when the couple were forced into French exile, he 
set up a similar but much smaller school in Paris.


  Sensation

Seghers began her writing career as a modernist, influenced by the 
political avant-garde. Her first published story, “The Dead on the 
Island Djal” (1924), playfully depicting restless souls in a graveyard, 
is based on the diasporic fates of Lukács, Mannheim, and other Budapest 
Sunday Circle members. In 1927, she published “Grubetsch,” about a 
charismatic figure whose existential anarchism and unleashed libidinal 
energy lead to seduction and ruin. In 1928, she published /The Revolt of 
the Fishermen/, again evocative of events surrounding the Hungarian 
Soviet Republic. Along with “Grubesch,” this novella was awarded the 
Kleist Prize — the equivalent of today’s Booker Prize or National Book 
Award.

Passport photo of Anna Seghers, Paris, mid-1930s.
(Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Anna-Seghers-Archiv, Fotokartei, Nr. 08, 
Mit freundlicher Genehmigung von Anne Radvanyi)

Both works were signed with the genderless pen name “Seghers,” borrowed 
from a seventeenth-century Dutch artist — thus allowing reviewers to 
applaud the author’s “hard,” “masculine” prose. When Seghers appeared at 
the prize ceremony — turning out to be an attractive young woman — she 
became a media sensation. Under her subsequent pen name, “Anna Seghers,” 
the novella was soon translated into ten major languages. It was also 
the first of Seghers’s works to be made into a film, /Vostanije 
Rybakov/. As for the literary canon, /The Revolt of the Fishermen/ takes 
its place with Franz Kafka’s /The Metamorphosis /and Thomas Mann’s 
/Death in Venice/ as a masterpiece of German modernist prose.

The same year as her public debut, Seghers joined the German Communist 
Party and the League of Proletarian-Revolutionary Writers. She did this 
at a time when the working-class movement was at its peak in Europe and 
the United States, when peasant uprisings were underway in Asia and 
Latin America, and when writers and intellectuals allied themselves with 
communist parties worldwide.

Predictably, this also affected her literary reputation, as during a 
publicity tour in London in 1929. The /Evening Standard/ reported that 
Seghers considered the English novel “rather tame,” her preference being 
the modern Russian school; that she shunned fashionable literary 
circles; and that as the guest of honor at a PEN-Club dinner, she gave 
an “intensely Communist speech.” Such skepticism notwithstanding, ten 
years later, the English poet John Lehmann called Seghers “the greatest 
woman artist of her generation on the Continent.”


  For a Free Germany

Like other left-wing and Jewish writers, in 1933, Seghers was 
blacklisted by the Nazis — and her books burned. Fleeing to Paris, she 
became an active speaker and essayist within the anti-fascist movement. 
The fascist threat had already influenced her work: her first novel, 
/The Wayfarers /(1932), portrayed right-wing reaction from Poland to 
Italy and China; her second, /A Price on His Head/(1933), depicted Nazi 
gangs in Hesse six months before the Hitlerite takeover.

Politics pervaded Seghers’s writing. In 1934, she traveled to Austria to 
document the February workers’ uprising 
<https://jacobinmag.com/2017/02/red-vienna-austria-housing-urban-planning> and 
trace the footsteps of socialist leader Koloman Wallisch, up till his 
eventual execution. The year 1937 saw the publication of her novel /The 
Rescue/, on the plight of unemployed Silesian miners; Walter Benjamin 
published an enthusiastic review the following year. In 1938–39, she 
wrote /The Seventh Cross/, about seven political prisoners escaping from 
a German concentration camp; only one evades capture, thanks to the 
underground Communist resistance and the support of ordinary citizens. 
The book’s publication in Europe was, however, prevented by the outbreak 
of war on September 1, 1939.

Rounded up by the French as an “enemy alien,” in April 1940, Radványi 
  was incarcerated in the notorious Le Vernet concentration camp; when 
the Germans marched on Paris in June, Seghers and her children joined 
hundreds of thousands fleeing south. Turned back by the Wehrmacht, they 
spent the summer in hiding in the French capital. In September, they 
made the dangerous illegal crossing to the unoccupied zone and found 
lodging near Le Vernet, in Pamiers. From there, Seghers made frequent 
trips to Marseille to secure travel papers and visas, and finally, in 
March 1941, the family departed Marseille on the /Capitaine 
Paul-Lemerle/. Fellow passengers on this cargo and refugee ship included 
the surrealist and Trotskyist André Breton and the anthropologist Claude 
Lévi-Strauss, who described the precarious voyage in his /Tristes 
Tropiques/. After detentions in Martinique, Santo Domingo, and Ellis 
Island, in late June, the family arrived in Mexico, where they were 
given asylum.

Around this time, Seghers began work on /Transit/. Based on her recent 
experiences in Marseille, the novel depicts the desperate, often failed, 
flight of Jews and others from Europe. Whereas the plot is related by a 
seemingly indifferent narrator — a man not unlike Rick Blaine in 
/Casablanca/ — the figure that haunts its pages is the writer Weidel, 
who commits suicide in Paris during the German invasion. Seghers based 
him on Ernst Weiss, a Moravian-born Jewish writer whom she had known in 
Paris before his suicide in June 1940. This choice was not an arbitrary 
one. Although a short passage in the novel alludes to Walter Benjamin’s 
suicide at the Spanish border village of Portbou, her focus on 
Weiss/Weidel memorializes a literary tradition belonging to East 
European Jewry — the main target of the Nazi genocide.

In Mexico, Seghers was a prolific speaker and contributor to the 
anti-fascist journal /Freies Deutschland/. Here, her comrades included 
the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, the Cuban-born interior designer Clara 
Porset, and the Mexican muralists Xavier Guerrero, Diego Rivera, and 
David Alfaro Siqueiros. Whereas in Paris she had relied on German exile 
presses and other small venues, 1942 brought a breakthrough — and 
much-needed financial support — when Boston’s Little, Brown and Company 
published /The Seventh Cross/ in English. A Book-of-the-Month-Club best 
seller, it was made into a Hollywood film directed by Fred Zinnemann and 
starring Spencer Tracy, Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, and Signe Hasso. It 
has since been translated into more than forty languages.

Disaster struck in June 1943 when Seghers was hit by a passing vehicle 
in Mexico City. She was hospitalized with a skull fracture, lay in a 
coma, and thereafter suffered from amnesia. During her recovery, she 
wrote her most famous and only autobiographical story, “The Excursion of 
the Dead Girls.” Written as if in a dream state, with multiple layers of 
place and time, the story tells of young Netty’s school excursion on the 
Rhine in 1912. Woven into its account are the subsequent lives and 
deaths of her schoolmates under Nazism. Shortly before she conceived her 
tale, Seghers learned that in March 1942, her mother, Hedwig Reiling, 
had been deported to the Piaski ghetto in Poland on a transport of 1,000 
Hessian Jews. The story of the school excursion culminates in Netty’s 
inability to reach her mother who waits for her on the balcony of their 
house.

She published this in 1946, together with two other stories responding 
to the Holocaust. “Post to the Promised Land” memorializes members of a 
Jewish family who survived a Cossack pogrom in Poland in the 1890s and 
wind up in Paris, by way of Vienna and Kattowitz. Their subsequent 
lives, and deaths, cite the fates of Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe 
in the first half of the century. Meanwhile, “The End” depicts a former 
concentration camp guard’s desperate bid to avoid capture by the 
Americans. He has no regrets, except that the Nazi hierarchy he so 
eagerly served has abandoned him. This was a scrupulous, and for its 
time astoundingly accurate, exploration of the Nazi psyche; its 
protagonist embodied “the banality of evil” seventeen years before 
Hannah Arendt used this term in /Eichmann in Jerusalem/. These three 
tales stand as Seghers’s unequivocal statement on the Holocaust. Yet 
each has its own prose form, thematic focus, and narrative style — as if 
to say there is no single adequate or authentic way to write about the 
extermination of the Jews.


  Postwar

Seghers returned to Germany after World War II as its preeminent and 
most internationally renowned anti-fascist writer. Anxious to write and 
be read in German, and to support the socialist rebuilding effort, she 
reached Berlin in April 1947 with the city still in ruins. Interviewed 
by the/New York Times/, she declined to say whether she thought 
“democratization” was possible in Germany — but commented that everyone 
she had met since arriving held “a political alibi in his outstretched 
hand.”

Her mother and other family members having perished in the Holocaust, 
Seghers did not find life among the Germans easy. In a letter to a 
friend, she called them “stunted” and “stultified,” and she described 
the survivors of the anti-fascist resistance as standing out from the 
crowd “like the first Christians from the spectators in a Roman arena.” 
As a communist, a Jew, and a woman, Seghers became a target of hostility 
in sectors of the West German press — a situation that intensified as 
the Cold War progressed. In 1950, she left the American sector and 
settled in East Berlin.

Anna Seghers.

There, Seghers was respected and admired as Germany’s foremost socialist 
author. But she did not have an easy relationship with her Party. In 
June 1948, after visiting the USSR, she wrote to Lukács that she felt 
she had “entered the ice age.” In this time of fresh Soviet purges, the 
“anti-Titoism” campaign, the 1949 show trial against Hungarian Communist 
interior minister László Rajk, and the arrest and imprisonment of the 
American Quaker Noel Field in Budapest, Seghers’s loyalties were 
questioned. She was marked out as a “West-émigré” who had been in 
contact with Field and received aid from his refugee relief 
organizations during her escape from France.  Similar “dubious” 
relations of hers were dredged up in preliminary interrogations for the 
1952 show trials in Czechoslovakia.

Faced with such accusations, Seghers was pressured to relinquish her 
Mexican passport and assume East German (GDR) citizenship. As for her 
work, when Socialist Unity Party (SED) chairman Walter Ulbricht read her 
1949 novel /The Dead Stay Young/ — about the far right’s encroachment 
among the working class, from the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl 
Liebknecht to the crimes of Nazism — he demanded to know why there was 
no explicit role for the Party. Indeed, Seghers’s writing was primarily 
concerned not with the Party, but with the people it claimed to represent.

Yet Seghers rarely tempered her outrage and opinions. Famous for her 
biting sarcasm and wit, at the 1950 Writers’ Congress she mounted a 
rousing defense of her 1932 novel /The Wayfarers/, inspired by the 
political avant-garde later denounced under Stalin. She also defended 
her radio play /The Trial of Jeanne d’Arc at Rouen, 1431/, written in 
the 1930s during the Stalinist purges. In 1952, she and her old friend 
Bertolt Brecht expanded the radio play for a Berliner Ensemble theater 
production — its first performance scheduled for the same week that the 
show trial of Rudolf Slánský and thirteen others was staged in Prague.

Notwithstanding these difficulties, Seghers did have supporters among 
Party leaders in Berlin and Moscow. As the GDR’s most prominent author, 
she was a feather in its cap — /The Seventh Cross/ alone sold a million 
copies, in this country of just 17 million. In 1952, she was elected 
president of the East German Writers’ Union, a post she held for 
twenty-five years. This allowed her to influence developments in the 
arts — especially by defending the aspirations of young authors and 
artists — and act as a model for the GDR’s especially large number of 
women writers. Despite frequent unfavorable cultural policy turns, she 
managed to steer East German literature along a path that brought out 
the next generation’s best talents.

Asked by Western reporters why she remained in the GDR, Seghers often 
said it was where she could write about what was important to her and 
pass this along to others. Her cultural influence was enormous, with her 
books read by generations of workers, intellectuals, and schoolchildren. 
She was a writer’s writer: the plays of Heiner Müller and the prose of 
Christa Wolf are unimaginable without her example.


  The Spirit of Her Time

Seghers’s postwar prominence in Europe as a woman writer and cultural 
figure was exceptional, matched only by Simone de Beauvoir in France. 
Photographs of her during Party meetings and World Peace Council 
congresses show her as the lone woman in a virtual sea of men. She 
traveled widely on behalf of both this council and the Writers’ Union, 
and in fall 1951, she was even able to revive her knowledge of Chinese, 
as part of a GDR delegation to the People’s Republic of China.

Yet despite her cosmopolitan self-identification, in the 1950s and 
1960s, her writing focused primarily on socialism and everyday life in 
her adopted country, be it in stories about postwar land reform or, as 
in her two great GDR novels of 1959 and 1968, about the stabilization of 
industry previously in the hands of Nazi-affiliated capitalists.

The year 1956 brought the Hungarian Revolution — and the arrest of the 
leaders of the revolutionary government, including prime minister Imre 
Nagy and Seghers’s friend Lukács. Against this backdrop, she wrote the 
third of her Caribbean novellas, /The Light on the Gallow/s. These three 
novellas, of which the first two appeared in 1949, deal with the Black 
Jacobin slave rebellions in Haiti, Guadeloupe, and Jamaica, suppressed 
by Napoleon’s troops. Seghers had them published together in 1962, just 
as anticolonial uprisings were spreading across the world. These were 
just a few of her many works depicting the struggles of indigenous 
people in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa, the last being 
/Three Women from Haiti/ (1980).

A prolific author, Seghers produced eleven novels, more than sixty 
stories and novellas, and a similar number of essays. She did this 
despite major upheavals and circumstances in which her life was often 
threatened. She was also under police surveillance for most of her 
career, whether by the Gestapo, the FBI, the French Sûreté, or the 
Stasi. At the height of the Cold War, sales of her books in West Germany 
were boycotted; even when her collected works began to be published 
there in the 1960s, reviewers were largely hostile.

Yet in the latter part of that decade, Seghers’s books found a belated 
reception, both among the extra-parliamentary and student movements, and 
thanks to Willy Brandt’s Social-Democratic government’s recognition of 
the first generation of anti-fascists. From the late 1970s, Seghers’s 
works were integrated into West Germany’s school curricula — where they 
remain to this day.

Recent decades have seen resurgent interest in Seghers. The centenary of 
her birth in 2000 saw celebrations throughout Germany and the launch of 
a twenty-four-volume critical, annotated edition of her works, of which 
twelve volumes have appeared thus far. The numerous adaptations of her 
works include Hans Werner Henze’s /Ninth Symphony/, whose fourth choral 
movement, like Beethoven’s /Ninth/, sets to music a political and moral 
tribute to its time — in this instance, /The Seventh Cross/.

Major theaters in Germany have staged dramatizations of Seghers’s works, 
and many exist as films, most recently Christian Petzold’s widely 
applauded /Transit/, which carries the novel’s focus on wartime 
migration into the multiethnic present. New translations have appeared, 
including in English: /Transit/ (2013); /Crossing: A Love Story/ (2016); 
“The Excursion of the Dead Girls,” “Post to the Promised Land,” “The End 
<https://muse.jhu.edu/article/670924>,” and /The Seventh Cross/ (2018).

Like Dante, Leo Tolstoy, and more recently Nadine Gordimer, Seghers was 
an epic writer who wrote against the grain of those in power. Her works 
evoke the spirit of her time in ways that most histories and 
documentaries cannot. Anyone who wants to know how people seeking 
justice can face adversity and still retain hope should read her books.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Helen Fehervary is academy professor of German Studies at the Ohio State 
University. She has published widely on modern German literature and is 
the editor of the multi-volume critical, annotated edition of Anna 
Seghers’s works.

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