Anna Seghers
Anna Seghers (November 19, 1900–June
1, 1983) was a German writer famous for
depicting the moral experience of the
Second World War.
Born Netty Reiling in Mainz in 1900
of Jewish descent, she married Laszlo
Radvanyi, a Hungarian Communist in 1925.
In Cologne and Heidelberg she studied
history, the history of art and Chinese.
She joined the Communist Party of
Germany in 1928, at the height of its
struggle against the burgeoning National
Socialist German Workers Party. Her 1932
novel, Die Gefährten was a prophetic
warning of the dangers of Fascism, which
led to her being arrested by the
Gestapo.
Tombstone of Anna Seghers in BerlinAfter
German troops invaded the French Third
Republic in 1940, she fled to Marseilles
and one year later to Mexico, where she
founded the anti-fascist
'Heinrich-Heine-Klub', named after the
German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, and
founded Freies Deutschland (Free
Germany), an academic journal. During
this time, she wrote The Seventh Cross,
for which she received the Büchner-Prize
in 1947. The novel is set in 1936 and
describes the escape of seven prisoners
from a concentration camp. It was
published in the United States in 1942
and produced as a movie in 1944 by MGM
starring Spencer Tracy. The Seventh
Cross was one of the very few depictions
of Nazi concentration camps, in either
literature or the cinema, during World
War II.
Seghers best-known story The Outing
of the Dead Girls (1946), written in
Mexico, was an autobiographical
reminiscence of a pre-World War I class
excursion on the Rhine river in which
the actions of the protagonist's
classmates are seen in light of their
decisions and ultimate fates during both
world wars. In describing them, the
German countryside, and her soon-to-be
destroyed hometown Mainz, Seghers gives
the reader a strong sense of lost
innocence and the senseless injustices
of war, from which there proves to be no
escape, whether or not you sympathized
with the Nazi party. Other notable
Seghers stories include Sagen von
Artemis (1938) and The Ship of the
Argonauts (1953), both based on myths.
In 1947, Anna Seghers returned to
Germany, moved to West Berlin, and
became a member of the SED in the zone
occupied by the Soviets. In 1950, she
moved to East Berlin and became a
co-founder of the freedom movement of
the GDR. In 1951, she received the first
Nationalpreis der DDR, the Stalin Peace
Prize also in 1951, and the
"Ehrendoktorwürde der Universität Jena"
in 1959. In 1981, she became
"Ehrenbürgerin" of her native town
Mainz. She died in Berlin on June 1,
1983.
