The Communist Thrillers of Anna Seghers

Seghers was born in 1900 in the ancient Rhineland city of Mainz, as Anna Reiling. At home, she went by Netty. Her father, Isidor, was a well-to-do art-and-antiquities dealer, and her mother, Hedwig, was active in Jewish causes. At first, Seghers leaned toward an academic career, studying art history at Heidelberg University and writing a dissertation on Jewish imagery in Rembrandt. But her relationship with Radványi—a fellow Heidelberg student and a refugee from the Hungarian Revolution of 1918-19—pulled her toward radical politics. She took the pseudonym Seghers from the Dutch painter Hercules Seghers, a contemporary of Rembrandt’s. The name endowed her with a certain mystery—a quality that she cultivated throughout her life. Although she was a vibrant public speaker and a sociable colleague, many found her cagey and elusive. This did not apply to her children, who later marvelled at how she had nurtured them through years of war and exile.

She began publishing fiction in the mid-nineteen-twenties. One of her earliest stories was a wrenching tale titled “Jans Is Going to Die,” about a poor, sickly child who perishes while trying to prove his mettle in games with other boys. (It appears in “The Dead Girls’ Class Trip,” an NYRB compilation of Seghers stories.) The scenario is shiveringly bleak, yet Seghers offers compensating moments of fragile beauty, as when Jans looks out his window at a swirl of snowflakes: “He had ten thousand companions every day, these little dancers from somewhere, dancing in courtyards and on windowsills to a music that no one could hear.” In 1928, Seghers published a terse, tense novella entitled “The Revolt of the Fishermen of St. Barbara,” which made her a star of left-wing culture.

Although Seghers was a Communist true believer, the breadth of her literary affinities, from E. T. A. Hoffmann to Kafka, put her in conflict with the dogmas of proletarian fiction. Doctrinaire critics accused her of being bourgeois, formalist, decadent. Indeed, she was never really a realist, even if working-class characters and situations populate her pages. Her settings tend to be a little vague, her protagonists more archetypes than individuals. Following Kafka’s lead, she wrote a series of artfully twisted fables and legends in a style both simple and strange. “The Best Tales of Woynok the Thief,” from 1938, conjures a proud, lonesome bandit whose solitude is tested by a merry company of thieves:

The sound of their songs was as clear and pure as the sound of the organ of Saint Ignaz on that Pentecostal morning when Woynok mixed in among the churchgoers for the first time in order to scout out everything before he set the fire. He had never coveted anything that one couldn’t steal, either by force or by guile, disguised as a pilgrim, or with a foot jammed in the door and the help of a shotgun barrel. He had never known a sorrow that one couldn’t cut or burn out of one’s flesh, or simply shake off like lice. But now, for minutes at a time here, around the fire, there were joys that could not be stolen and sorrows that could not be burned away, for they didn’t even exist.

Even in her more overtly political writing, Seghers retains that errant fairy-tale tone. In her early novel “The Wayfarers,” a story of exiled revolutionaries that has yet to be translated into English, a Bulgarian guerrilla fighter named Dudoff becomes a Woynok-like legend, his escapes from death assuming religious overtones. Communism was, of course, a quasi-religion in its own right, and Seghers saw the need for saviors and martyrs.

“Blood Money,” published in 1933, is Seghers’s first major novel—a seamless blend of journalistic realism and mythic allusion. The opening paragraphs at once apply an iron grip. A farmer named Bastian is coming in from the fields when he buckles over in pain outside his front door. “Close behind him stood Death, its hand raised to add a stone to his load—enough to finish him off,” Seghers writes. Bastian gets up, goes inside, and sits down with his family for dinner. As he is saying the Lord’s Prayer, he hears footsteps coming to the door—“a long shadow was suddenly cast across the twilit parlor.” It is not Death but a fair-haired, blue-eyed twenty-year-old lad named Johann. There’s obviously something amiss with him: he’s sweaty and dirty, he’s wearing someone else’s boots, he’s almost collapsing from hunger. Bastian’s wife surmises that Johann must be a relative, and he is invited to eat. Bastian, in a burst of generosity that he soon regrets, lets the boy spend the night. Seghers coolly adds, “He thought he did so because he believed in God.” The late Margot Bettauer Dembo handled NYRB’s previous Seghers translations; Lucy Jones has taken over, and excellently conveys the incisive bite of the writing.

It is the summer of 1932, and police bulletins are offering a bounty for the capture of Johann, who has been accused of killing a cop during a hunger march in Leipzig. (The novel’s German title, “Der Kopflohn,” means “head price.”) It’s unclear whether Johann is guilty or not, and, given the Nazification of the police, the distinction doesn’t matter. He’s less a shining idealist than an adventurous upstart, his insouciance falling on the line between brave and stupid. He runs errands for a band of local Communists, but he also finds time for a fling with a local girl. His bro-ish ordinariness illustrates the political stakes in 1932—or in any year of your choosing. Seghers shows how the Nazis win over unemployed youth by hosting parades, concerts, and outdoor expeditions. Johann enrages them because, as a model Aryan, he ought to be on their side. Unlike many other leftists, who saw the Nazis as mere puppets of capitalism, Seghers understood the raw, sensual appeal of the Fascist message.

A “Wanted” poster for Johann is hanging in a town near Bastian’s village, and several residents see it. A Jewish merchant named Naphtel is tempted by the reward but feels a “primal aversion, smoldering in honest human hearts, to delivering a persecuted man into the hands of the state.” The downtrodden farmer Algeier could use the money even more, yet he can’t stand the idea that his prosperous neighbor Merz, a zealous Red-hater, would “laugh himself to death to see this boy paraded through the village.” The novel is full of such finely shaded moral studies; no one is completely innocent, with the possible exception of Bastian, a paragon of unquestioning hospitality. Even the hard-core Nazis reveal glints of humanity. A hulking brute named Zillich, whose antisemitic ravings at a political meeting leave other farmers dazed and submissive, loses his menacing aura when he wins prizes at a fairground and exults boyishly.

“Blood Money,” like most of Seghers’s stories, is male-dominated. Scholars of her work have debated why women seldom take center stage. Partly, she may have been yielding to the marketplace: feminism didn’t rank high among leftist concerns. Yet Seghers deftly exposes the insecurity, loneliness, and longing that hide behind masculinist poses. She often suggests a subliminally romantic tie between an older man and a youth, such as the one between Bastian and Johann. Women tend to be victims rather than actors, but they are not rendered mute. The most harrowing scene in “Blood Money” involves a woman named Susann Schüchlin, who is so abused by her husband and so worn down by motherhood that she decides suicide is the only way out. In a scene of terrible power, she drowns herself by jamming her body into a hollow tree trunk through which a stream flows. When, at the end of the novel, Bastian’s niece Sophie marries a wealthy young Nazi, you fear that the same cycle is starting again.

Shortly after the burning of the Reichstag, in February, 1933, Seghers fled Germany and settled in France, where she carried on with up-to-the-minute political storytelling. “The Way Through February” (1935) is a journalistic novel about the Austrian Civil War of 1934, and “The Rescue” (1937) expands on “Blood Money” in showing how Nazi propaganda feeds on the discontents of the German working class. These novels, too, have yet to appear in English, and they may presume too much background knowledge. But the opening sequence of “The Rescue” is another tour de force of coiled action: a stolid working-class hero, trapped in a mine with six comrades, prevents the others from losing hope before rescue arrives.

“I can remember a time when this was all trees.”

Cartoon by Edward Steed

A clammy sensation of entrapment suffuses “The Seventh Cross” (1939), which chronicles the flight across Germany of a fugitive named Georg Heisler. Although Seghers experienced only the first weeks of life in Nazi Germany, she absorbed the accounts of eyewitnesses, including a memoir by the trade unionist Hans Beimler, who had escaped from Dachau in 1933. Seghers’s narrative also eerily anticipates her own frantic maneuvers in Nazi-occupied France. Uncertain about her future, she had sent various manuscripts of the novel abroad. At least one copy fell into the hands of the Gestapo, which was hunting for Seghers and interrogating her associates.

The crosses to which the title alludes are, in fact, plane trees on the grounds of a fictional concentration camp called Westhofen, in southwestern Germany. When seven prisoners break out of the camp, Fahrenberg, the commandant, has the trees shorn of their branches and turned into crosses. Each escapee, upon being caught, is to be crucified. This savage bit of theatre comes back to haunt Fahrenberg when the tree intended for Georg remains unoccupied. The commandant begins to lose sleep fretting over his own survival, and Seghers almost makes us feel sympathy for him. Zillich, the brute from “Blood Money,” reappears as a sadistic guard at Westhofen and becomes the target of Fahrenberg’s panicked fury—one cog in the system getting mangled by another. In a later story, “The End,” set in 1945, Seghers gives her readers the satisfaction of seeing Zillich get his comeuppance, although, as one of his pursuers says, “you can’t kill Satan. You’d have to completely finish off this old, ugly world first.”

Just as Seghers refuses to turn Nazis into cartoon villains, she declines to make her hero a saint. Georg, an unemployed auto mechanic, comes across as an arrogant jock. He picks up Communist ideology from his bookish friend Franz and steals away Franz’s girlfriend in the process. He generally treats women as playthings and casts them aside when they are no longer of use. Men, too, are manipulated. When a male driver gives Georg a ride and shows faint hints of sexual interest, Georg ponders killing him and stealing his car. So why do we care about Georg? Because, as Seghers writes, he has been reduced to the status of a hunted animal, “escaping into the wilderness that was his life.”

Georg, like Johann in “Blood Money,” is a spectral stranger who poses tests for the auxiliary characters. The outcomes are contingent and unpredictable. Consider a teen-ager named Fritz, whose jacket Georg steals. Fritz is inordinately proud of the jacket—a zippered brown corduroy number that he bought to impress his girlfriend. He is an obedient member of the Hitler Youth and seems poised to play the role of the malignant brat. Yet he becomes oddly enamored of his jacket’s outlaw status. When Georg discards the item and it is found by the police, Fritz is summoned to Westhofen to identify it. To his own surprise, he announces that it isn’t his jacket, throwing the search off course. In such trivial moments of rebellion, the seeds of resistance are sown. Heroism is a matter of chance.

Seghers signed a contract for the American edition of “The Seventh Cross” in June, 1941, while she was interned on Ellis Island. She had hoped to gain admission to the United States, but the immigration authorities declared that she and her family could not enter, on the ground that her daughter had “defective vision.” This transparently flimsy excuse covered up the real reason: the F.B.I. had flagged Seghers as a potentially dangerous Communist. J. Edgar Hoover took a personal interest in the case, maintaining surveillance of Seghers once she went to Mexico. Her mail was opened, her friends’ apartments were broken into, copies of “The Seventh Cross” were scrutinized for imaginary codes. Seghers’s F.B.I. file, which eventually ran to nearly a thousand pages, is an ironic boon to scholars, shedding light on her daily life in Mexico and providing insight into the composition process of her masterpiece, “Transit.”

This time, the desperate dude at the center of the story serves as its first-person narrator, which perversely results in our knowing almost nothing about him, not even his real name. He is a disaffected cipher, expertly evoking the agonized chaos of Paris and Marseille in 1940 while remaining ostensibly detached from the proceedings. At times, he sounds like a Raymond Chandler type, revelling in real-life noir. He archly describes, for example, the predicament of a conductor from Prague who has been offered a job leading a spa orchestra in Venezuela:

He had to start the new position in Caracas before the end of the year. He had already had a work contract before and because of the contract, a visa, and because of the visa, a transit visa, but it took so long for the exit visa to be issued that the transit visa expired in the meantime, and after that the visa and after that the contract. Last week he was issued an exit visa, and he was now anxiously waiting for an extension of his contract, which would mean he could then get an extension of his visa. And that would be a prerequisite for his being awarded a new transit visa.

Ultimately, everything falls into place, and the conductor is ready to go—until, at the American consulate, he finds that he has brought only eleven photographs, not the requisite twelve. He loses his booking. Outside, he finds that two of his photos were stuck together. He gets back in line, collapses, and dies. As the narrator watches the ambulance take away the conductor’s body, his mood lifts: “After all I was still young and strong.”

“Transit” bears a resemblance to “Casablanca,” which Seghers possibly saw in Mexico. The principal character puts up a world-weary, hardboiled front, like Humphrey Bogart’s Rick, but over time he melts. When a writer named Weidel kills himself in Paris, leaving behind a suitcase full of manuscripts, the narrator becomes the caretaker of this literary legacy, even though he’s no intellectual. (Seghers modelled Weidel on the Austrian writer Ernst Weiss, who took his life after the fall of Paris. She probably also thought of Walter Benjamin, whose suicide, at the Spanish border, is mentioned in “Transit.”) The protagonist then has an affair with Weidel’s wife, Marie, who thinks that her husband is still alive and searches for him, despite the fact that she is now in love with a third man, a doctor. The intrigue becomes especially heady when the narrator takes over Weidel’s identity. He has a chance to leave on a ship called the Montreal, but he gives up his berth in order to go underground in France. Marie sails away with the doctor. Alas, the first sentence of the novel has foretold their doom: “They’re saying that the Montreal went down between Dakar and Martinique.” It’s like Rick saying to Ilsa, “You’re getting on that plane,” except that the plane crashes.

When our shadowy hero reads Weidel’s unfinished novel, he calls it a fairy tale for adults, about a “wolf who bewitched grown-up children.” He himself is telling a story of that type. It’s a static thriller that unfurls against a deep historical backdrop, with archetypes recurring across time. Seghers observed in a letter that, in Marseille, everyone turns into Odysseus. In the novel, likewise, the narrator assumes an almost Homeric guise, comparing current harbor gossip to chatter from the Phoenician, Cretan, Greek, and Roman eras. He thinks of “mothers who had lost their children, children who had lost their mothers”; he sees “the remnants of crushed armies, escaped slaves, human hordes who had been chased from all the countries of the earth.” A Jewish woman “looks old enough to have been driven out of Vienna not by Hitler but by an edict of the Empress Maria Theresa.” The protagonist becomes a wise-guy version of Benjamin’s Angel of History, watching calamities accumulate before his eyes.

The grim irony hanging over Seghers’s later career is that she fled from one totalitarian state only to become enmeshed in another. Outwardly, she had a position of almost untouchable eminence in the East German cultural apparatus. Between 1952 and 1978, she served as president of the Writers’ Union, functioning as a more or less reliable mouthpiece for Soviet ideology, from Stalin to Brezhnev. Behind the scenes, she shielded colleagues from trouble. Christiane Zehl Romero, her chief biographer, noted that the bullheaded Bertolt Brecht had benefitted from Seghers’s protective maneuvers, as did rebellious younger writers such as Heiner Müller and Christa Wolf. Even as Seghers was hemmed in by fear and uncertainty, she gave no indication that she ever regretted her path. Her story “The Just Judge,” which emerged after the fall of the Wall, tells of an East German judge who refuses to convict an unfairly accused man and is arrested as a result. In prison, the judge is asked whether he would still elect to serve the state if he knew that it would unfairly condemn him. He answers, “I would choose it again, and make this state, just this one, exactly this one, as good as possible.”

After the Second World War, Seghers produced only three more full-length novels, none matching her earlier masterpieces. In 1949, she published “The Dead Stay Young,” a panoramic saga of German revolution and reaction from 1918 to 1945. Although it contains riveting sequences, it tends toward staginess and bagginess, lacking the sweaty momentum of her previous work. “The Decision,” which appeared in 1959, and its sequel, “Trust,” from 1968, dwell laboriously on the reconstitution of the steel industry in an East German town. A sample passage: “They replaced the clay that until then had been used to line the tapping spout with another material that would not be detrimental to the quality of the steel.” Brecht once observed that Seghers thrived on the depiction of oddballs and loners. There are too few of them in the later novels, which answer the official demand for optimistic narratives of rebuilding.

Fortunately, Seghers continued writing shorter fiction, which gave her more leeway to exercise fantasy. (Likewise, Dmitri Shostakovich could experiment more openly in his quartets than in his symphonies.) NYRB’s story collection includes “The Ship of the Argonauts,” an avant-garde fable in which the mythological hero Jason returns from his wanderings and kills time awaiting the fulfillment of his fate. In later years, Seghers wrote several stories set in the Caribbean, one of them dramatizing the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture. Perhaps NYRB could include these in a second volume of Seghers’s shorter fiction, alongside her late story “Stone Age,” which was inspired by D. B. Cooper, the airplane hijacker who’d parachuted into oblivion in 1971. Seghers transforms Cooper into another of her restless desperadoes—a Vietnam vet in quest of an unspoiled world. The title alludes to General Curtis LeMay’s infamous words about the North Vietnamese: “We’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.”

A sovereign observer, Seghers rarely drew directly on her life, but she made an exception in “The Dead Girls’ Class Trip,” a convulsive meditation on the psychic toll of exile. She wrote the story in Mexico in 1943 and 1944, when she was becoming aware that her mother had been killed in the Holocaust. (Her father had died in Mainz in 1940.) The narrator is idling in a rural Mexican village when she hears—or thinks she hears—a voice crying “Netty!” She flashes back to her girlhood in Mainz and, in particular, to a boat trip on the Rhine that she once took with classmates. Memories of the outing are spliced with glimpses of future darkness: Leni will be sent to a concentration camp; Marianne will betray her; Else will die in an air raid; Sophie will be deported, along with their teacher Fräulein Sichel. Yet the day retains its unknowing innocence. Nostalgia and dread meld into one. When Netty returns home, her mother is waiting on a veranda. As Netty begins to climb the stairs, however, the steps stretch out in all directions beneath her, “as infinitely deep as an abyss.” The reverie breaks; the bannister becomes a row of cacti. Still, a hazy thought lingers: Netty never got around to submitting a report on her class trip. She will write it now, although Fräulein Sichel can no longer read it. ♦