In celebrating the 20th anniversary of the peaceful revolution that brought down the Wall, we will profile over the course of 2009 important East Germans who have shaped beyond all physical borders the cultural, intellectual and political life of postwar Germany and Europe. 

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German author Anna Seghers (real name Netty Radvany, née Reiling), pictured on her 80th birthday, in Berlin, 1980

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Anna Seghers's life is a reflection of political developments in 20th-century Germany, from the German Empire (1871 to 1918) to the Cold War era. Having come of age during the German Empire, Anna Seghers attended university, began to write, and started a family during the era of the Weimar Republic. In 1933, the year in which Hitler seized power, she went into exile with her family, moving first to France and then later to Mexico. After the war, she returned to Europe and lived in East Berlin from the founding of the GDR in 1949 until her death in 1983.

She was born Nelly Reiling, daughter of an affluent Jewish art dealer in Mainz, on November 19, 1900. In 1920, she began studying art history, history, sinology, and philology at the universities of Heidelberg and Cologne and wrote her dissertation on the topic “Jews and Judaism in the Work of Rembrandt.”

During her studies, she came in contact with Marxist groups, and through them she became acquainted with her future husband, Laszlo Radványi. In 1928, she joined the Communist Party of Germany, which was by then already fully aligned with the ideology of the Stalinist Soviet Union. At that time, the German Communist Party had a very large following, numbering in the millions.

With the fall of the German Empire, the old, familiar political and social structures collapsed, yet the new democratic institutions of the Weimar Republic were not yet firmly anchored in society and still seemed foreign to the people. The hyperinflation of 1922/1923 and the global economic crisis of 1929 brought starvation and unemployment. Political extremism and growing violence frequently led to uprisings similar to civil war.

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Anna Seghers' last residence is now a museum and memorial place in Berlin-Adlershof.

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Notwithstanding all these problems, the arts experienced a major heyday during the Weimar era. Liberated from the state censorship in effect during the imperial era, film, theater, literature, and the fine arts blossomed unencumbered and established new movements. Like many artists of the Weimar Republic, Anna Seghers viewed art as a means of changing society. She did not write merely to describe things and events; rather, she used writing as a form of political activism. For her, art was never an apolitical activity. She began publishing under the pseudonym Seghers in 1927. In 1928, she was honored with the Kleist Award, the most important literary prize of the Weimar Republic, for her novella Der Aufstand der Fischer von Santa Barbara (Revolt of the Fishermen of Santa Barbara). During the Third Reich, her works fell victim to the Nazi book burnings.

After the Gestapo briefly arrested her in 1933, she decided to leave Germany and fled with her family to Paris via Switzerland. There she was active in the Schutzverband Deutscher Schriftsteller (Association for the Protection of German Authors) and in the Popular Front. After Paris was occupied by the Nazis, friends helped her to reach the still unoccupied part of France. Before the family boarded a ship from Marseille to the West Indies, Anna Seghers attained the release of her husband from a French internment camp in the Pyrenees. The family fled via Martinique and the Dominican Republic to Mexico, where one of the largest colonies of German exiled authors was living at that time. In her novel Transit, she describes the experiences of refugees and the search for a new home.

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A film based on "The Seventh Cross," starring Spencer Tracy and Jessica Tandy, was released in Hollywood in 1944.

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The novel Das siebte Kreuz (The Seventh Cross), which was inspired by conversations with German refugees, initially appeared in English translation in the United States in 1942, establishing her global fame. In it, she tells the story of seven inmates who try to escape from a concentration camp, of which only one ultimately succeeds with the help of other people. Literary critics have interpreted this book as a metaphor for two different Germanys: Nazi Germany, which must be destroyed, and the good Germany, which will survive. The work Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen (The Excursion of the Dead Girls) written during her Mexican exile is the author’s only work with autobiographical overtones.

In 1947, she returned to Germany and was awarded with the Büchner Prize by the city of Darmstadt in the same year. After the GDR was established, she settled in East Berlin and became intensively involved in the communist peace movement in the ensuing decades. During this time, she wrote mainly stories and essays, but several novels as well.

She served as president of the German Writers Association in the GDR from 1952 to 1978. Because the association was also responsible for implementing the cultural policy of the GDR, it could not develop independently from the regime. For the GDR, East Germany stood for progressive socialist literature and West Germany, for decadent capitalist literature. Fellow writers such as Wolf Biermann, Stefan Heym, the Russian author Soljinitzyn, and others who had fallen out of favor with the regime could not rely on the support of the association, which had also formally approved of political events such as the construction of the Berlin Wall.

She never publicly expressed doubts about the regime, and she did not criticize the unjust treatment of her colleagues in the GDR, or did so only half-heartedly. Western authors and critics denounced her for what appeared to be unconditional loyalty to the state.

Did she believe that the GDR had become the better Germany which she anticipated in The Seventh Cross? Or did she not want to face the reality that the state which had showered her with honors had no future and that neither the Soviet Union nor the GDR would live up to her lifelong desire of a just, socialist society?

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Anna Seghers was one of the most important writers in the GDR.

(© picture-alliance/ dpa)

Anna Seghers was a public person, but when it came to her private life, she was very discrete. Ruth Radvanyi, Anna’s daughter, once said in an interview that her mother only rarely spoke of her worries in exile and later in Germany. She herself did not deal more closely with her mother’s work until Seghers became subject to widespread criticism following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany.

To many, Anna Seghers is the most important female German author of the 20th century. Others see the prewar period as her most creative period and believe that her later work does not approach the quality of her previous writings but instead adopts the style of the literary concept of Socialist Realism. An early work completed in 1925, Jans muss sterben (Jans Must Die), was published posthumously in 2000 and was well received by critics. 

In 2010, we will celebrate the 110th anniversary of her birth. International and American literary scholars are now working on a new, comprehensive edition of her writings. We hope that, having gained some distance from the political events of the 20th century, literary critics will provide a fair and balanced assessment of her work.