ANNA SEGHERS
...I realized that what cannot be described....didn’t exist...
Anna Seghers: German, Jewish, communist, writer, wife, mother. For each of these terms we should reflect. Many contradictory identities, the one apparently excluding the other, many deep and painful relationships. (Christa Wolf).
Anna Seghers (pseudonym of Netty Reiling) was born in Mainz in 1900 into a cultural Jewish family, and died in Berlin in 1983. She exhibited an early interest in art (her father was an antique dealer and art expert) and she got a great interest for her first works – remarkable is her first novel, The revolt of Santa Barbara fishermen, for which she receives the Kleist-preis, a story which tells of the spontaneous insurrection of Breton fishermen against a monopoly.
Her characters are plunged in the social and political contradiction and show her interest in Dostoevsky. In her works she paid much attention to details, reflecting in this the ideas of New Factualism. For the background of her novels she made much research work, she seldom wrote about her own life.
“In these stories there are many desperate characters who hide themselves. When you write you have to do it in a way that from desperation will arise something new, and from hiding, the possibility of emerging.
As many of the artists of that period she joined the Communist Party. In 1925 she married the Hungarian writer and sociologist Laszlo Radvanyi and when Hitler came to power in 1933 Seghers’s writings were prohibited and she was briefly arrested. She than fled to France with her husband, joining other German exiles, than in Vienna, Spain and Mexico. Here in particular she made many important friendships, such as the ones with Pablo Neruda and Jorge Amado, who considered Anna like a sister.
Among her main works are – apart from the above mentioned novel – The way of February (1935), which dealt with the Engelbert Dollsuff uprising in Austria.
She lived in Paris until the invasion of Northern France in 1940, whereupon she made her way to Marseille. Here she wrote the novel Transit, which captures dramatically the moods and motives of refugees waiting to leave Europe in search of a new life. All stand at a crossroads, including the enigmatic male narrator, and contemplate their “new” lives beyond that continent, and unpredictable non –dogmatic discourse on identity, commitment, and progress unfolds.
On the contrary of many of her colleagues her productivity didn’t suffer because of the exile. This period is in fact, according to many critics, the most interesting for the kind of works she produced. In Santo Domingo, where she spent two weeks while living in Mexico, she wrote her most famous work, The seventh cross (1942), for which she received the "Büchner-Prize" in 1947. She had never been in a concentration camp but she interviewed refuges and collected their experiences in her book. The book was published in German language in Mexico and in English in the United States, where it was a huge success. The Seventh Cross was made into a successful Hollywood film, directed by Fred Zinnemann and starring Spencer Tracy.
The story was about seven prisoners who escape from a concentration camp, and are pursued by the Gestapo. Nazis set up in the camp seven crosses to wait for the refugees. Four of them are captured, the fifth dies naturally when he is reaching his native region, the sixth loses his hope and returns to the camp, but the seventh cross remains empty. The seventh man, George Heisler, survives, not by cunning or superior skill, but through the complicity of a web of common citizens unwilling to bow to the Gestapo.
The year after, Anna’s mother died in a concentration camp.
Seghers firmly believed that as a writer she could advocate the cause of the proletariat, but she became disillusioned when the German workers did not stop the Nazi takeover.
Anna Seghers believed that justice and humanistic culture can be built only on the grounds of socialism and communism. In DDR she devoted herself to developing a simpler, terser literary style in accordance with the canon of socialist realism. Feminist criticism has accused her of describing women in essentially subordinate position to male hero, who is seen as primary agent for building a new socialist order. However, her stature has not been adequately recognized in the West after the fall of DDR. When Brecht was too distant character for the younger generation of women writers, Seghers became a “mother figure” for many. Her work inspired among others Christa Wolf.
During her exile she also continued with her political work. In 933 she formed with Oskar Maria Graf and Jan Petersen (who was secretly working from Berlin) the editorial board of a new magazine called Neue Deutsche Blaetter, which was published in Prague until 1935. In their introduction to the first issue the editors wrote:
There is no neutrality. For no one. Least of all for the writer. He who is silent also takes part in the struggle; he who, frightened and numbed by events, flees to a purely private existence, who uses the weapon of language as a plaything or an ornament, who serenely resigns himself, dams himself to social and artistic sterility and abandons the field to the enemy.
After the war she returned to East-Berlin. Many artists / intellectuals decided to establish in the East German, after the war. Among these Friedrich Wolf, Bertold Brecht, Ernst Bloch, Arnold Zweig, Jan Petersen, Eric Arendt. The return was nearly as frustrating, if not as dangerous, as her efforts to leave had been.
“When I returned from emigration I traveled cross Germany from the west. The cities were destroyed, and the people were just as destroyed inside. Germany then offered a ‘unity’ of ruins, desperation, and hunger”
In 1946 appeared other works, such as The Dead stay Young (1949) which portrayed martyred communists in a world of reactionaries and good revolutionaries. During the following decades she participated in numerous international conferences, representing DDR, and from 1952 to 1978 she was the president of the writers’ union.
To tell what incites me and the colors of the tales. This is what I wish to combine, but I don't know how....
In her writing Anna Seghers crossed many literary genres, but never fall down the essay or the documentary novel. Writing meant for her first of all telling stories, from which also emerge the fact that the will of resisting is not only reserved to militants, but also to common people, like a gardener, a doctor, a teacher, provided that they joint their forces together.
Anna Seghers also gets a "cameo" mention in the ostalgie film, Good Bye Lenin!.
Ostalgie is a German term (the English equivalent would be eastalgia) referring to nostalgia for life in the former East Germany. It is a portmanteau of the German words Ost (east) and Nostalgie (nostalgia).After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and German reunification in the following year, most reminders of the old socialist regime were swept away as former citizens of the German Democratic Republic rushed to embrace their newfound political and economic freedoms. However, with the passing of time some East Germans missed certain aspects of their old lives. There are also many who do not identify with such cultural divisions, and deny the existence of separate East and West German perspectives. Ostalgie particularly refers to everyday parts of life in the former GDR that disappeared after reunification, overwhelmed by capitalism and Western culture.
Through the text we have selected (an extract from “The seven cross”, available through the link), we invite the reader to make his own image of the writer, which we consider of great value not only for being of greatest contemporary interest, but also for the literary treasures which preserves.
By Simona Cappellini
