Anna Seghers

Anna Seghers (German: [ˈana ˈzeːɡɛʁs]; born Anna Reiling, 19 November 1900 – 1 June 1983) was a writer who was born into a Jewish family in Germany. She was notable for exploring and depicting the moral experience of the Second World War.

Anna Seghers in 1966

Quotes

The Dead Girls' Class Trip: Selected Stories

Translated from the German by Margot Bettauer Dembo

• It happened the first week of April, I think. (beginning of "The Lord's Prayer")

• A miracle that he was even speaking, and then to say what he had said. Usually you hear only about the things that excited people, never about what silenced them. (from "Tales of Artemis")

• It had all been in vain. The prayers in churches and in mosques-all in vain. The invocations, the appeals to long-forgotten, long-ignored gods-in vain. And their final resistance with knives and teeth-in vain. Cowardice had also been in vain. Hiding, waiting-everything in vain. In vain, too, the promises, the hopes, the unexpected generosity of strangers. Whether their fathers had started plowing only yesterday or their forefathers two thousand years ago-it was all in vain. Men who looked death in the eye as they did life, coldly without blinking, and wore lions' claws made of iron on their belts, their courage was in vain; and in vain did the lion keep his vigil before the palace in the capital city. The conquerors rode astride his back and tore at his mane, yelling and hooting. Everything that had existed before had become incomprehensible. The totality of life and living, because it was suddenly all in vain. The simple yesterday and the day before yesterday that were clear to everyone, and the two thousand years that some men could look back on, the incredible, hazy yet real life, one's own existence from time immemorial-the one as much in vain as the other. If there is not going to be any future, then the past will all have been in vain. (beginning of "The Guide")

• He stopped before a shopwindow, and we recognized his face. On the left side of his forehead, just below the hairline, he had an incredible scar. He stood there, with this hole in his temple, in the middle of the colorful Parisian winter-evening throngs, like one risen from the dead, like the captain of a ship of the dead. Such people wear their own legend like a heraldic crest wherever they go. And whenever we see such people, their external appearance reminds us of this legend. (from "Meeting Again")

• One morning in September 1940, when the largest swastika flag in all of the countries occupied by Germany was flying over the Place de la Concorde in Paris, and the lines outside the shops were as long as the streets themselves, a certain Luise Meunier, the wife of a lathe operator and mother of three children, heard that one could buy eggs at a shop in the 14th arrondissement. (beginning of "Shelter")

Transit (1942)

translations from the original German to English by Margot Bettauer Dembo (2013)

• They're saying that the Montreal went down between Dakar and Martinique. That she ran into a mine. The shipping company isn't releasing any information. It may just be a rumor. But when you compare it to the fate of other ships and their cargoes of refugees which were hounded over all the oceans and never allowed to dock, which were left to burn on the high seas rather than being permitted to drop anchor merely because their passengers' documents had expired a couple of days before, then what happened to the Montreal seems like a natural death for a ship in wartime. That is, if it isn't all just a rumor. And provided the ship, in the meantime, hasn't been captured or ordered back to Dakar. In that case the passengers would now be sweltering in a camp at the edge of the Sahara. Or maybe they're already happily on the other side of the ocean. Probably you find all of this pretty unimportant? You're bored?-I am too. May I invite you to join me at my table? Unfortunately I don't have enough money for a regular supper. But how about a glass of rosé and a slice of pizza? Come, sit with me. Would you like to watch them bake the pizza on the open fire? Then sit next to me. Or would you prefer the view of the Old Harbor? Then you'd better sit across from me. You can see the sun go down behind Fort St. Nicolas. That certainly won't be boring. (beginning of chapter 1)

• "With me it's something else," he said. "I'm Jewish. For me the magnanimity of the German people was never even a consideration." (Chapter 4 p98)

• The Spaniards waiting there gathered around us, watching our reunion and smiling with the indomitable hearts of passionate people not yet hardened by war, detention camps, or the horror of thousands of deaths. (chapter 6 p127)

• I felt anxious, the way you do when a dream seems too real and at the same time something intangible, imperceptible, tells you that whatever makes you feel happy or sad can never be reality. (chapter 7 p156)

• And yet although all this transit whispering made me feel quite miserable, it was amazing to think that even though thousands, no, hundreds of thousands, had died in the flames of the air raids and the furious attacks of the Blitzkrieg, there were many more who were born quite without being noticed by the consuls. They hadn't asked for letters of transit, hadn't applied for visas; they were not under the jurisdiction of this place. And what if some of these poor souls, still bleeding physically and spiritually, had fled to this house, what harm could it do to a giant nation if a few of these saved souls, worthy, half-worthy, or unworthy, were to join them in their country-how could it possibly harm such a big country? (chapter 8 p178)

The Seventh Cross (1942)

originally published in German as Das siebte Kreuz, translated into English by James A. Galston (1942)

• [He] got up out of bed and stuck his head out of his little window as far as he could. It was utterly quiet. But for the first time this quiet failed to give him a sense of peace-the world wasn't quiet, it was speechless. Involuntarily he pulled his hands out of the moonlight which, like no other light, has the faculty of clinging to every surface and penetrating every crevice. (chapter I p60)

• The whole town was a tortuous net in which he was already caught. He would have to slip through the meshes. (chapter III p173)

• If there remained in him only the strength for one tiny movement in the direction of freedom, no matter how senseless and useless the movement, he would still want to make it. (chapter III p173)

• What normally is spread over the span of a lifetime, over a number of years, an exertion of all of one's powers to the breaking point, the relaxing and yielding and painful straining again-all this took place in his mind in the space of an hour-while minutes changed. (Chapter V, p262)

Quotes about

• Seghers is one of those rare twentieth-century German writers who had a need and a use for the short-story form throughout the entire span of her career. The genre enabled her to react relatively quickly to shifting situations. The stories in this collection span a period of just over thirty years-covering the Weimar Republic after the onset of inflation, the Great Depression, the Nazis' seizure of power, Seghers's escape to France, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and her emigration to Mexico, and extending on into the postwar period, the Cold War, the emergence of two German states, and the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, which exposed the crimes of Stalinism. There is no other writer working in the German language over that long span of time whose stories and novellas have such stylistic diversity and such a wide range of approaches and aims. Seghers wanted to describe the world in order to change it. In this sense, each specific time finds its embodiment in one of her stories.
  • Ingo Schulze from the Introduction to The Dead Girls' Class Trip: Selected Stories (2021)

External links

• Information on the translated novels by John Manson
• Die-Anna-Seghers-Home-Page
• Foreword to a biography on Anna Seghers, University of Michigan Press
• "Anna Seghers" Jewish Women's Archive page
• Anna Seghers' literary memorial in Berlin