Anna Seghers's Response to the Holocaust

The essay, written by the co-translator of the three stories published in this issue, discusses the German author Anna Seghers as a writer, antifascist activist, and psychological observer. Born into a Jewish family and a lifelong member of the Communist Party, Seghers was forced into exile from Germany in 1933. Family members, including her mother and aunt, died in concentration camps. Seghers became one of the first of her generation to write about the Holocaust, and among major German authors, perhaps no one wrote as much about the Holocaust and the events surrounding it as did Seghers. But after the 1940s, aside from occasional references and allusions, she stopped. For her, the Holocaust was not only a historical event of devastating proportions but also a personal reality whose all too painful memory she henceforth kept to herself.