China und China-Erfahrung in Leben und Werk von Anna Seghers (review)

Anna Seghers (1900–1983) is one of the most important, yet still controversial German woman writers of the 20^th century. A Jewess from the Rhineland, who received a doctorate in art history from Heidelberg and the Kleist-and—much later—the Büchner-Prize for her writing, she was also an early Communist who would never completely lose faith, at least not openly. After 14 years in exile in France and Mexico she eventually ended up in East Berlin where she became head of the German Democratic Writers' Union. It was an unenviable position in which she remained longer than she wanted and her precarious health should have allowed. Throughout her often difficult life Seghers never stopped writing fiction and essays and produced a large body of work, including such major novels as Das siebte Kreuz (1942) and Transit (1944) and outstanding stories such as "Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen" (1946).

Scholarship on the author, which had for the most part been partisan during the Cold War, has become more diverse and sophisticated in the last 20 years. Since 1992 there is a yearbook, Argonautenschiff, dedicated to Seghers, which features a variety of approaches and contributors from different countries. A new edition of the works is in progress (Anna Seghers. Werkausgabe) at the Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin. It relies on an international group of scholars as individual editors for the 25 scheduled volumes; ten volumes, including two of Seghers' letters, have already appeared.

Weijia Li's study China und China-Erfahrung in Leben und Werk von Anna Seghers is representative of these newer directions in Seghers scholarship. It is the first comprehensive look at the author's encounters with China, its culture, people, and political developments, offering a thorough analysis of how these encounters are reflected in her work. As an addendum Li also briefly deals with Seghers's reception in China. He clearly has the linguistic and educational background necessary for the Chinese aspects of his investigation and successfully integrates this knowledge into careful research on Seghers and her interest in China over time. For the latter he relies on a thorough consideration of published sources focused on Germany's historical and political contexts for Seghers's involvement with China and Chinese contemporaries. And he has done original research, especially in the Seghers-Archiv at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. His analyses also demonstrate intimate knowledge of Seghers's work and the relevant scholarship. Li manages to identify a number of actual events and Chinese individuals with which or with whom Seghers was familiar and contributes considerably to a better understanding of the author's imaginative process, the ways in which she converted and condensed factual information into artistically vivid figures, episodes, and stories.

Neither Anna Seghers's interest in China, nor her actual encounters with Chinese students and political activists in Berlin, nor her use of Chinese material in her work were that unusual for her generation of young left intellectuals, as Li of course notes. However, as was often the case with Seghers, her involvement went deeper, lasted longer, and was originally kindled by art. As a child she had become fascinated by Chinese pictures and stories and as a student studied Chinese art and language. That much has been well known for some time, because Seghers herself spoke of it in a rare autobiographical aside in "Erinnerungen an Philipp Schaeffer" from 1975. Schaeffer had been a good friend and fellow student of Chinese in Heidelberg, but in 1943 was executed by the Nazis for resistance. Li does not say so, but his book suggested to me that this essay, besides commemorating the man, also reasserted Seghers's life-long interest in China about which she had publicly fallen silent long ago. Soviet-Chinese relations had become strained and this, of course, affected the GDR.

Li's study traces the full range of Seghers's intellectual and artistic engagement with...