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<address><font size="-1"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/11/anna-seghers-jewish-writer-germany-holocaust">https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/11/anna-seghers-jewish-writer-germany-holocaust</a></font></address>
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<h1 class="title" style="font-size: 1.95552em; margin-top: 0px;
max-width: 100%;">Anna Seghers, a Writer Who Defended the Wretched
of the Earth</h1>
<div class="metadata singleline" style=" margin-top: -0.75em;
max-width: 100%;"><span style=" color: rgb(25, 25, 25);
font-family: Hurme-No3, sans-serif; font-size: 17px;
background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">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. </span></div>
<div class="metadata singleline" style=" margin-top: -0.75em;
max-width: 100%;"><time class="date"><span style=" color: rgb(25,
25, 25); font-family: Hurme-No3, sans-serif; font-size: 18px;">By
Helen Fehervary </span></time></div>
<figure><img alt=""
src="https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/19110232/anna-seghers-1940.jpg"
style="max-width: 100%; display: block;"
class="myimg-responsive" width="512" height="329"><figcaption>
<p style="max-width: 100%; margin-top: 0.4em;">Anna Seghers in
Paris, circa 1940. (Archive, Aufbau Verlag, Berlin)</p>
</figcaption></figure>
<section>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">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, <a
href="https://theamericanreader.com/bookcase/transit/"
rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">the opening lines of
her 1944 novel <em>Transit</em></a>, about refugees escaping
European fascism, could speak just as well to the dangers
encountered by migrants crossing borders today.</p>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">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.</p>
</section>
<section>
<h1 style=" max-width: 100%;">Radical Origins</h1>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">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.</p>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">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.</p>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">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.”</p>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">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.</p>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">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.”</p>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">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.</p>
</section>
<section>
<h1 style=" max-width: 100%;">Sensation</h1>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">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 <em>The Revolt of the Fishermen</em>, 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.</p>
<figure><img
src="https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/19110348/seghers-anna-en.jpg"
alt="" style="max-width: 100%; display: block;"
class="myimg-responsive" width="390" height="548"><figcaption>Passport
photo of Anna Seghers, Paris, mid-1930s.<br>
(Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Anna-Seghers-Archiv, Fotokartei,
Nr. 08, Mit freundlicher Genehmigung von Anne Radvanyi)</figcaption></figure>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">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, <em>Vostanije Rybakov</em>. As for the
literary canon, <em>The Revolt of the Fishermen</em> takes its
place with Franz Kafka’s <em>The Metamorphosis </em>and Thomas
Mann’s <em>Death in Venice</em> as a masterpiece of German
modernist prose.</p>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">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.</p>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">Predictably, this also affected her
literary reputation, as during a publicity tour in London in
1929. The <em>Evening Standard</em> 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.”</p>
</section>
<section>
<h1 style=" max-width: 100%;">For a Free Germany</h1>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">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, <em>The
Wayfarers </em>(1932), portrayed right-wing reaction from
Poland to Italy and China; her second, <em>A Price on His Head</em>(1933),
depicted Nazi gangs in Hesse six months before the Hitlerite
takeover.</p>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">Politics pervaded Seghers’s writing.
In 1934, she traveled to Austria to document the <a
href="https://jacobinmag.com/2017/02/red-vienna-austria-housing-urban-planning"
rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">February workers’
uprising</a> and trace the footsteps of socialist leader
Koloman Wallisch, up till his eventual execution. The year 1937
saw the publication of her novel <em>The Rescue</em>, on the
plight of unemployed Silesian miners; Walter Benjamin published
an enthusiastic review the following year. In 1938–39, she
wrote <em>The Seventh Cross</em>, 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.</p>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">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 <em>Capitaine Paul-Lemerle</em>. 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 <em>Tristes
Tropiques</em>. After detentions in Martinique, Santo Domingo,
and Ellis Island, in late June, the family arrived in Mexico,
where they were given asylum.</p>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">Around this time, Seghers began work
on <em>Transit</em>. 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 <em>Casablanca</em> — 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.</p>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">In Mexico, Seghers was a prolific
speaker and contributor to the anti-fascist journal <em>Freies
Deutschland</em>. 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 <em>The Seventh Cross</em> 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.</p>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">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.</p>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">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 <em>Eichmann in Jerusalem</em>. 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.</p>
</section>
<section>
<h1 style=" max-width: 100%;">Postwar</h1>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">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<em>New
York Times</em>, 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.”</p>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">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.</p>
<figure><img
src="https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/19110510/bk-fehervary_2019_aseghersbrill-420x315.jpg"
alt="" style="max-width: 100%; display: block;"
class="myimg-responsive" width="420" height="315"><figcaption>Anna
Seghers.</figcaption></figure>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">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.</p>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">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 <em>The
Dead Stay Young</em> — 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.</p>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">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 <em>The Wayfarers</em>, inspired by the political
avant-garde later denounced under Stalin. She also defended her
radio play <em>The Trial of Jeanne d’Arc at Rouen, 1431</em>,
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.</p>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">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 — <em>The Seventh Cross</em> 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.</p>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">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.</p>
</section>
<h1 style=" max-width: 100%;">The Spirit of Her Time</h1>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">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.</p>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">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.</p>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">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, <em>The Light on the Gallow</em>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 <em>Three Women from Haiti</em> (1980).</p>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">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.</p>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">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.</p>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">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 <em>Ninth
Symphony</em>, whose fourth choral movement, like Beethoven’s <em>Ninth</em>,
sets to music a political and moral tribute to its time — in this
instance, <em>The Seventh Cross</em>.</p>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">Major theaters in Germany have staged
dramatizations of Seghers’s works, and many exist as films, most
recently Christian Petzold’s widely applauded <em>Transit</em>,
which carries the novel’s focus on wartime migration into the
multiethnic present. New translations have appeared, including in
English: <em>Transit</em> (2013); <em>Crossing: A Love Story</em> (2016);
“The Excursion of the Dead Girls,” “Post to the Promised Land,” “<a
href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/670924" rel="nofollow
noopener" target="_blank">The End</a>,” and <em>The Seventh
Cross</em> (2018).</p>
<p style="max-width: 100%;">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.</p>
<p style="max-width: 100%;"><span style=" color: rgb(25, 25, 25);
font-family: Hurme-No3, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">ABOUT THE
AUTHOR</span></p>
<p class="po-fr__desc" style=" font-size: 18px; color: rgb(25, 25,
25); font-family: Hurme-No3, sans-serif;">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.</p>
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