Writing to Change the World. Anna Seghers, Authorship, and International Solidarity in the Twentieth Century by Marike Janzen (review)

Marike Janzen’s title promises a discussion of the symbiotic relationship between authorship and international solidarity, and the book delivers on this promise. It focuses on the work of Anna Seghers, an international writer who achieved the rank of deity in the East German cultural pantheon. Janzen’s book joins a steady stream of scholarship on the work of Seghers, including Brigit Ohlsen’s 2017 monograph on the concept of “Heimat.” However, Janzen’s contribution is unique in its focus on the theme of solidarity in Segher’s writing. Writing to Change the World aims to create a “global history of authorship” by employing comparative methods that mirror Seghers’ own belief that authors are connected “via simultaneous engagement with leftist institutions” (6). Janzen’s argument for the relevance of international solidarity in literary production is supported by close readings of Seghers, Berthold Brecht, Alejo Carpentier, and Gaytari Spivak. The texts analyzed span most of the twentieth century and serve as a model for reading the author as an “agent of coevality” who describes, and foments, social change.

After laying out the premises and main goals of the book in the Introduction, Janzen devotes the first chapter to a discussion of Seghers’ own contribution to the creation of an institutional context for “solidarian authorship.” This took the form of a literary fellowship funded by the royalties from the sale of Seghers’ works. Supported by meticulous research, Janzen chronicles the fascinating history of a Fellowship (Anna Seghers Stipendium, before the fall of the Berlin Wall) and later of a Prize (Anna Seghers-Preis, after Reunification) by means of which Seghers aimed to reward East German and Latin American authors who effect international social transformation. In particular, the chapter tracks state and institutional involvement in awarding the Fellowship and the various political and economic factors that influenced the distribution of the award from 1986 until 2016. Janzen argues that even though the term “solidarity,” which was linked to a communist political project, has been replaced by “tolerant multiculturalism” in the language that describes the guidelines for the Prize (21; 37), the essence of the prize is nevertheless still concerned with solidarity. This is because the Prize continues to challenge asymmetries of literary production, to foster solidarity, and to define the author’s role as that of an agent intent on changing the world through writing.

The following three chapters trace the historical development of “solidarian authorship” in Seghers’ work throughout the twentieth century. In Chapter 2, Janzen connects the beginning of “solidarian authorship” to the interwar period in her comparison of Seghers’ first novel, Die Gefährten (1932), and Brecht’s play Die Maßnahme (1930), which focus on international communist political agents. She skillfully shows how both Brecht and Seghers depict “international solidarity against exploitation by those owning the means of production” (68). Both authors argue that the collective is more important than the individual; both use faceless political agents to embody the message of solidarity; and both understand that the writer’s role is to be this faceless agent of “coeval” struggle.

In the next chapter, Janzen travels forward almost three decades and widens the cultural context in order to compare the work of Seghers and Carpentier, a state-sanctioned author who held an esteemed position in Cuba similar to that of Seghers in the German Democratic Republic (GDR, former East Germany). This chapter expands on Janzen’s article “Messenger Writers: Anna Seghers and Carpentier in the Cold War” (published in Comparative Literature in 2010) by integrating the comparison of Seghers’ Das Licht auf dem Galgen (1961) and Carpentier’s El siglo de las luces (1962) into a larger context of “solidarian authorship.” Here “solidarian authorship” takes the form of the “historical messenger writer” who criticizes contemporary practices through the vehicle of writing about the past. The plot of these works focuses on European agents encouraging...