Anna Seghers, a communist, antifascist, Jewish writer in search of home
- The Left Chapter
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Anna Seghers
By Jürgen Reusch. Junge Welt, 22 October 2025. Translated by Helmut-Harry Loewen
She was a poet and writer with heart and soul, a communist, an antifascist, a Jew. Throughout her life, she was also a migrant, a refugee. Anna Seghers was born in Mainz in 1900 and died in East Berlin in 1983. Club Voltaire in Frankfurt am Main marked her 125th birthday as an occasion to hold a moving event at the Haus am Dom, which – beautifully moderated by Claus-Jürgen Göpfert – explored the relevance of Anna Seghers today. Many of her works were discussed that evening, including her most famous novel, “The Seventh Cross,” a work begun in Paris in 1938 and published in Mexico in 1942. It tells the story of the concentration camp prisoner Georg Heisler, who is the only one of seven escapees to succeed in fleeing to freedom, thanks to the solidarity of others. Seghers prefaced the novel with the following sentence: “This book is dedicated to the dead and living antifascists of Germany.”
Escape, exile, and the actuality of the antifascist legacy in Anna Seghers' work were also the themes of the evening. The fact that it took place at all, in front of a packed hall in the Haus am Dom, was the result of efforts by a handful of activists such as Jürgen Hinzer from the very same Club Voltaire where Anna Seghers had read from her works in 1962. Philipp Jacks, chair of the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB) in Frankfurt, took note of this. Back then, that event angered conservative elites in the city. Police cruisers were deployed outside the venue. It was not until 1981, two years before her death, that the city of Mainz decided to award her honourary citizenship. In fact, as Helga Neumann from the Literature Archive of the Academy of Arts in Berlin emphasized, Anna Seghers' work was by no means well received in the early decades of the former Federal Republic.
In 1933, she had to flee with her family, first to Paris, then, after a series of detours, to Mexico in 1941, where she was welcomed and remained until 1947. She did indeed have a wonderful time there, according to Claudia Cabrera, a German Studies professor from Mexico City who has translated many of Anna Seghers' works into Spanish. But the longing for her homeland (Heimat) was always there. In Mexico, she found friends, was able to work productively, and gained worldwide recognition. But she was also in exile; she was not in Mainz, not in Berlin, not in Germany, the country of her language, one which she mastered in her literary works.
The third presenter at the event, Frankfurt actress Bettina Kaminski, read from Anna Seghers' works and letters, including a letter written from exile in 1946 to a local politician in Mainz, in which she expressed her longing for the city and country of her birth.
Anna Seghers knew what it felt like to flee. This is still the case for many people today, said Claudia Cabrera, and only rarely are they treated as well as Anna Seghers was in Mexico. Bettina Kaminski read a scene from Seghers' novel “Transit” that describes the misery of those who are forced to flee and are at the mercy of a merciless bureaucracy that leaves the desperate waiting for visas and residence permits. Seghers' text reads like a contemporary report on the subject of migration.
The antifascist Anna Seghers chose to live in the German Democratic Republic and remained there until her death. She was acutely aware that conditions there were not idyllic, a favourite topic of a malicious West German commentariat regarding her “loyalty to the communist party line.” Seghers never expected utopia either, Helga Neumann emphasized, but she worked to understand this emerging new society with its numerous contradictions. Her novel “Die Entscheidung” (The Decision), published in 1959 by Aufbau-Verlag in Berlin, bears witness to this. In Germany on the other side, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, as expected, banned the book with the authority of a literary pope. Even though Seghers was a daughter of Mainz and one could hear its regional inflections in her spoken language, this West German republic - with its arrogance, its anti-communism, its fascist legacy never properly dealt with, and the utter absence of a principled antifascist position - could not be her home.
~ Original article: “Auf der Suche nach Heimat. Eine Veranstaltung im Club Voltaire in Frankfurt am Main widmete sich Leben und Werk der Schriftstellerin Anna Seghers anlässlich ihres 125. Geburtstags” [In search of home. An event in Club Voltaire in Frankfurt am Main was dedicated to the life and work of Anna Seghers on the occasion of her 125th birthday]. The translator has modified the title of this article.