Anna Seghers (November 19, 1900, Mainz – June 1, 1983, Berlin) was a German writer famous for depicting the moral experience of the Second World War.
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Life
Born Netty Reiling in Mainz, 1900, she married Laszlo Radvanyi, a Hungarian Communist in 1925. She studied in Cologne and Heidelberg history, arts history 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 got her arrested by the Gestapo. But perhaps she would have suffered at the hands of the Nazis anyway, since her family background was partly Jewish.
After 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 was set in 1936 and described the escape of seven prisoners from a concentration camp. It was published in the United States in 1942 and produced as a movie (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 Excursion 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 you sympathized with the Nazi party or not. 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" and the "Ehrendoktorwürde der Universität Jena" in 1959. In 1981, she became "Ehrenbürgerin" of her native town Mainz.[1][2] Anna Seghers gets a "cameo" mention in the ostalgie film, Good Bye Lenin!.
Selected works
- 1928 - Aufstand der Fischer von St. Barbara - Revolt of the Fishermen of Santa Barbara (novel)
- 1933 - Der Kopflohn - A Price on His Head (novel)
- 1942 - Das siebte Kreuz - The Seventh Cross (novel)
- 1943 - Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen - The Excursion of the Dead Girls (story) (in: German Women Writers of the Twentieth Century, Pergamon Press, 1978)
- 1944 - Transit - Transit Visa (novel)
- 1949 - Die Toten bleiben jung - The Dead Stay Young (novel)
- 1973 - Benito's Blue and Nine Other Stories
References
External links
- Biography (books and writers)
- Information on the translated novels by John Manson
- Die-Anna-Seghers-Home-Page (in German)
- German biography (Potsdam University)
