Anna Seghers (1900-1983)
Ian Wallace writes in praise of an outstanding twentieth-century German novelist, author of The Seventh Cross.
Anna Seghers - the pseudonym of Netty Reiling - was born in Mainz. The cossetted only daughter of middle-class, well-to-do Jewish parents, she showed little serious interest in securing a comfortable future as part of the family's successful business in art and antiquities. Instead she quickly developed a sense of her vocation as a writer and achieved early success with her story Die Fischer von St. Barbara (1928), for which (together with her short story "Grubetsch") she received at the tender age of 28 one of Germany's major literary awards, the prestigious Kleist Prize. Published in London in 1929 by Elkin Mathews and Marrot as The Revolt of the Fishermen, the English translation by Margaret Goldsmith earned the praise of Arnold Bennett ("original, unsentimental, and true") and brought Seghers to Britain on a promotional visit at the end of the year. In 1928 she also joined the German Communist Party, one year later she became a member of the League of Proletarian Revolutionary Writers in Berlin, and in 1930 she was a prominent delegate at the international conference of Proletarian Revolutionary Writers which took place in the Soviet Union. In this way she had not only made a radical break with her conventional upbringing - she had also taken a fundamental decision about the future direction of her life and her creative work. Given the early influence of, among others, Kirkegaard, she was well aware of how life-determining such 'either-or' decisions are (and they continued to fascinate her as a writer in years to come), but nothing could have prepared her for the terrible consequences of Hitler's accession to power in 1933. As communists and as Jews she and her husband, the Hungarian intellectual Laszlo Radvanyi, were forced to flee Germany immediately with their two children, finding refuge near Paris until 1940 when, following the fall of France, they made their way first to Marseilles and then, the following year, to Mexico. Here she remained until her return, in 1947, to a Berlin in ruins.
Remarkably, it was in the chaos of exile that Seghers wrote many of the works on which her reputation rests. Published in the USA by Little Brown in 1942 (and still in print today in the 1987 edition by Monthly Review Press), Das siebte Kreuz is a classic example of a work which had a major impact in English translation long before it reached the German readership the author originally had in mind. "A story to be read with quickened pulse and choking throat" promised the headline above Rose Feld's glowing review in the New York Herald Tribune on 27 September 1942, just one of many which helped to turn James A. Galston's English translation, The Seventh Cross, into a runaway bestseller. The novel was a Book of the Month choice, and such was its success that a comic strip version immediately followed which reached an estimated 20 million readers. Hollywood, too, got in on the act; Fred Zinnemann's The Seventh Cross (1943) - starring Spencer Tracy - was among the best anti-fascist movies to be made there after the USA entered the war in December 1941.
The Seventh Cross tells the story of seven men who escape from a Nazi concentration camp, one of whom manages to evade recapture and thus to embody the indomitable spirit of resistance to fascist oppression. A second masterpiece, Transit, also deals with an attempted escape (a theme which fascinated Seghers throughout her life) but one involving hundreds of émigrés caught up in a bureaucratic nightmare in Vichy France as they frantically try to acquire the documents which will allow them to escape by ship from Marseille before they are seized by (or handed over to) the advancing Nazis. Galston's translation (published as Transit in 1944, again by Little Brown, but now out of print) served the author well and achieved satisfactory sales, although even this major creative achievement could hardly expect to repeat the wholly exceptional commercial success of its predecessor. Nevertheless, on the basis of Galston's translations, Anna Seghers enjoyed a position of some eminence among the English-reading public as the post-war era got underway.
Seghers returned to Europe in 1947 determined to give sustenance to the 'better Germany' she had always believed in even when the Nazi war-machine was at its most destructive and despite the crushing knowledge that her own mother was among the innumerable victims of the camps. Among the irreplaceable works which - almost miraculously given the circumstances in which they were conceived - she brought with her and now presented at last to a German readership were the epic novel Die Toten bleiben jung, which she completed after her arrival in Berlin and which was published in Galston's translation in 1950 by Little Brown as The Dead Stay Young; and the short story "Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen" in which - untypically for such a private writer - she movingly uncovers her deepest feelings about her childhood friends, her parents, and her teachers in pre-war Mainz (there is no English translation of this important work currently in print).
As a recently published collection of letters edited by Christel Berger* graphically shows, the Germany Seghers found in 1947 was a cold and dispiriting place, the minds of its people no less scarred than the physical landscape. Their moral and political re-education, she realised, would be a struggle even for a writer with such strong pedagogical instincts as herself. The subsequent division of the country in the wake of the Cold War turned her into a symbol of the ideological split between East and West. In the GDR she took on an icon-like quality as "our Anna", a supreme representative of the country's claim to combine respect for literary culture with anti-fascist, socialist policies serving the cause of peace. In the Federal Republic, however, she was frequently condemned as the willing puppet of a repressive regime. Since her death in 1983 and in particular since the achievement of German unification, a much more balanced view of Seghers's literary stature has emerged. The centenary of her birth was marked in 2000 by a series of conferences, readings, and other events. Das siebte Kreuz was republished as the first of the 24 volumes which will eventually make up Aufbau's Werkausgabe. Major reassessments of her literary achievements have appeared, including Sonja Hilzinger's Anna Seghers (Reclam: Stuttgart, 2000), as has the first volume of Christiane Zehl Romero's path-breaking biographyAnna Seghers. Eine Biographie 1900-1947 (Aufbau: Berlin, 2000). The publication in 2000 of the masterly short story Jans muss sterben - written in the 1920s but only recently unearthed by Pierre Seghers among his mother's papers - continues the recent series of such exciting discoveries. Given this sustained upsurge in interest, what better time than now to devise fresh, up-to-date translations which will introduce Seghers anew to the English-speaking world where she has already enjoyed notable success?
*Anna Seghers, Hier im Volk der kalten Herzen. Briefwechsel 1947, ed. Christel Berger, Aufbau: Berlin, 2000
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Ian Wallace is Professor of German at the University of Bath and editor of German Monitor.
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