Abstract

This article analyzes Anna Seghers’s 1952 novella “Der Mann und sein Name,” the first major fictional work that Seghers published about post-Nazi Germany and the construction of the German Democratic Republic. Using archival materials, it examines the ambiguous and controversial reaction of early readers and critics to the novella, as well as Seghers’s responses to criticisms. The article treats the protagonist’s development as a process of outward and inward conversion that ultimately brings the individual psyche into alignment with the outside world, and it argues that this process was paradigmatic not only for the early GDR but for postwar Germany in general.

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