Profile of Anna Seghers on Famous Like Me

Anna Seghers (November 19, 1900 – June 1, 1983) was a German writer who was born in Mainz and died in Berlin. She spent most of her life in East Germany. Although not very well known in the English speaking world, she is still famous in Germany, particularly the East.

Life

Born Netty Reiling in Mainz, 1900, she married Laszlo Radvanyi, a Hungarian Communist in 1925.

She joined the Communist Party of Germany, in 1928 at the height of its struggle against the burgeoning Nazi party. Her 1932 novel, Die Gefährten was a prophetic warning of the dangers of Fascism, which got her arrested by the Gestapo. But perhaps she would have suffered at the hands of the Nazis anyway, since her family background was partly Jewish.

After German troops invaded France in 1940, she fled to Marseilles and one year later to Mexico, where she founded the anti-fascist 'Heinrich-Heine-Klub', named after the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, and founded 'Freies Deutschland' (Free Germany), a resistance organisation. During this time, she wrote Das siebte Kreuz which was put on the screen in 1944 in the U.S., and for which she received the "Büchner-Prize" in 1947.

In 1947, she returned to Germany, moved to West Berlin, and became a member of the SED in the zone occupied by the Soviets. In 1950, she moved to East Berlin and became a co-founder of the freedom movement of the GDR. In 1951, she received the first "Nationalpreis der DDR" and the "Ehrendoktorwürde der Universität Jena" in 1959. In 1981, she became "Ehrenbürgerin" of her native town Mainz.

Anna Seghers gets a "cameo" mention in the ostalgie film, Goodbye Lenin.

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