Anna Seghers and Mexico

Peter Chametzky

On November 21, 1941, more than one hundred German-speaking exiles from Central Europe gathered in Mexico City for the first meeting of the Heinrich Heine Club.1 The Heine Club’s readings, lectures, discussions, and performances formed a cultural refuge for Central European intellectuals who had escaped German fascism by fleeing to Mexico. At this first meeting the celebrated author Anna Seghers (1900–1983) read from her works and was elected Heine Club president.

Born Jewish in Düsseldorf in 1797, Heine’s advocacy of liberal democratic principles and his literary satires of German tendencies toward authoritarianism and small-minded provincialism earned him exile to France, where he died and was buried in Paris in 1856. But Heine never lost his love of the German language or his ambivalence toward Germany, making him an apt namesake for the Mexico City group. “He could hate and love better than any of us,” Seghers stated in her 1946 Heine Club farewell speech.2

In Paris in 1935 Seghers had participated in the first Congrès international des écrivains pour la défense de la culture (International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture). Attended by thousands, the speakers, in addition to Seghers, included Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, André Gide, André Malraux, Boris Pasternak, and the German communist writer and Spanish Civil War veteran Gustav Regler, who would also go into Mexican exile and whom Gisèle Freund photographed at the conference sitting with Seghers.

Like the Paris conference, the Heine Club was concerned with preserving culture against the onslaught of fascism. German-speaking intellectuals were especially concerned not to concede the German language, German history, and German cultural expressions to Adolf Hitler and his henchman or to his intellectual supporters. In Paris, Seghers had delivered the speech “Vaterlandsliebe” (Patriotism). Like Heine, she maintained great love for Germany’s language, literature, landscape, and, as a communist, its laboring classes—even as she attacked its current rulers. Having argued in Paris that culture is what creates a Volk and not the Nazi’s blood and soil, she found in Mexico a model for a diverse, mestizo society defining itself culturally, particularly through its visual art.

Seghers and the Heine Club sought to create bonds with intellectuals and activists in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, such as Antonio Castro Leal, publisher of the exiles’ journal Freies Deutschland / Alemania libre (Free Germany); labor leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano; and Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. In the first issue of Freies Deutschland (November 1941), Seghers published “Deutschland und wir” (Germany and us), in which she reiterated many of the ideas of her Paris address—beginning with reclamation of such terms as Vaterland (fatherland) and Volk (The folk)—while also rejecting the claims of the British lord Robert Gilbert Vansittart and German-American Emil Ludwig that Nazism and war were fundamental expressions of the German character that needed to be obliterated. 3

Like many in the Bewegung Freies Deutschland (Free Germany Movement), Seghers was a communist, having joined the party in 1929. She remained committed to the international communist movement throughout her life, though not to the repressive aesthetic policies emanating from party headquarters in Moscow and later Berlin. Like philosopher Ernst Bloch, who took a contrary position to Georg Lukács in the 1938 “Expressionism Debate,” Seghers accepted the potential for modernist art to communicate progressive political content even as it experimented with form, as she did in her writing. In a long 1938 letter to Lukács, she juxtaposed Heinrich von Kleist to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, asserted she never understood El Greco as a realist until she went to Spain during the Civil

War, and, like Bloch, referenced Franz Marc’s expressionist blue horses before stating that “all genuine artworks have an element of Realism, in their tendency to bring reality into consciousness.”4

Among the intellectuals who fled to Mexico to escape fascism, Seghers was unusual in several ways. First, and to state the obvious, she was a prominent woman writer. While other women were involved in the Mexican exile community, such as the translator and writer Mariana Frenk and the photographer Tina Modotti, the majority of writers and organizers were men. Her two children, Peter (b. 1926) and Ruth (b. 1928), accompanied Seghers and her husband, the Hungarian philosopher László Radványi (1900–1978), on their three-month exilic journey from Marseilles to Martinique to Santo Domingo to Ellis Island, New York, before the family landed in Veracruz in July 1941. 5 Her gender and status as a wife and mother no doubt motivated Seghers’s exploration of Mexican women as wives, mothers, and workers, such as in her 1951 story Crisanta. 6

Seghers was further unusual in having earned widespread acclaim as an author, first in Germany, where she won the Kleist Prize for emerging writers in 1928 for her 1927 short story “Grubetsch” and her first novel, Aufstand der Fischer von St. Barbara (Revolt of the Fishermen of Santa Barbara) and then internationally with the novel The Seventh Cross (fig. 4). Written during her French exile and while her husband was interned in concentration camps, The Seventh Cross was first published by Boston’s Little, Brown and Company in 1942 in an English translation by James Galston. According to Seghers, several versions of the manuscript had been lost—in flight, in battle, and in fire—while one was preserved by a friend in the United States.7 An abridged version became a Book of the Month Club selection, a bestseller, and the basis for the 1944 MGM feature film directed by Austrian-born Fred Zinnemann and staring Spencer Tracy as George Heisler. The Seventh Cross tells the story of Heisler and six other escapees from a Nazi concentration camp. It includes but does not emphasize the persecution of Jews and communists and became an early and successful attempt at alerting the world to Nazi crimes and the fellow-travelers enabling them. In a 1938 letter Seghers called it “a small novel . . . a fable that presents the opportunity to get to know the many layers of fascistic Germany through the fate of a single man.”8 For art critic Harold Rosenberg, “the jail break in a totalitarian state turns into a social struggle,” with George’s fate determined not by his guile, of which he has little, but by others’ choices to help him or not, to be “an informer or an accessory.”9 The first German edition, Das siebte Kreuz, was published in Mexico in 1943 by the exile press El Libro Libre (The Free Book). Translated into more than forty languages, the novel absolved her and her family of financial hardship, another unusual aspect of her exilic life.

Finally, so far as I know, she was the only university-trained PhD art historian among the Mexican exiles. Just as her personal situation made her sensitive to the position of women in Mexico, her art-historical background and training provided her with an appreciation, indeed a love, of the visual qualities of the landscape and built environment, and the light and colors animating both, as well as the appearance of the people of Mexico and of the art she saw as emanating from and speaking to them.10

Seghers was born Netti (later Netty) Reiling to a Jewish family in Mainz, an ancient city on the western bank of the Rhein at its confluence with the River Main. Her father, Isidor, and uncle Hermann were proprietors of a prominent dealership in art and antiquities that they inherited from their father.11 Her mother, Hedwig, encouraged her daughter’s intellectual and artistic development, especially her deep reading of German and Russian classic literature. Both Isidor and Hedwig were murdered in the Holocaust.

Netty Reiling studied at Heidelberg from 1920 to 1924. She earned her PhD with the dissertation Juden und Judentum im Werke Rembrandts (Jews and Judaism in the works of Rembrandt). Her adviser, Carl Neumann, promoted progressive Rembrandt scholarship to counter the racist Germanic claptrap that Julius Langbehn propagated in his wildly and bizarrely popular 1890 Rembrandt als Erzieher (Rembrandt as educator).12 Her dissertation constituted her last art-historical publication and the last before she adopted her pen name, first Antje and then Anna Seghers, derived from Rembrandt precursor and contemporary Hercules Seghers (1589–1638), creator of atmospheric land and seascape etchings and paintings. In Heidelberg she met Radványi, then a student of Karl Jaspers. Radványi had been the youngest member of the

Budapest “Sunday Circle” around the communist theorist Lukács. Seghers would engage throughout her life with both men’s ideas, including not only Lukács’s mature “reflection theory”—which has been construed as hostile to modernist experimentation—but also his early thought, which was imprinted with the expressionist ethos of the 1910s and early 1920s.13 In the same year as her dissertation, Reiling, as Antje Seghers, published her first short story, “Die Toten auf der Insel Djal” (The dead on the island of Djal). From the start, while Seghers was a realist writer and storyteller, her work did not conform to party-line socialist realism. The best-known short story she wrote in Mexico, “Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen” (The Excursion of the Dead Girls, 1943–1944), tinted darkly by the murder of her parents and her own recuperation from a traffic accident, reveals surrealist or magical realist tendencies in its temporal and spatial discontinuities and the estrangement of the everyday into the fantastic. In her definitive study of Seghers’s work and its influences and influence, literary scholar Helen Fehervary argues that Seghers derived her realism from her understanding of Rembrandt and what she termed his “overreal” (überwirklich) depiction of Jews and Jewish life.14 Rembrandt’s work, Seghers argued, denied both the Jewish stereotypes and the reality of Jewish life of his time. The telling details in a Rembrandt etching might be the facial expressions of ancillary characters, such as the grieving mourners’ faces that contrast to those who seem unaffected by the drama depicted in his greatest drypoint, The Three Crosses (perhaps an inspiration for The Seventh Cross?), thus depicting variety rather than uniformity in human responses to tragedy. When depicting Christ as a Jew, Rembrandt was not interested in depicting a “typical” Jewish face but in capturing elements of expression that would render the Jewish Christ as an individual.

Her art-historical background, as well as her politics, determined Seghers’s response to art in Mexico. In her 1949 essay on Diego Rivera, in addition to remarking that his 1947 mural Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central (Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central Park) was made to decorate a hotel bar catering to “spoiled American tourists” and recounting the controversy that arose over the inscription on a piece of paper depicted in a philosopher’s hand—“Dios no existe” (God does not exist)—Seghers praised the artist’s collapse of time and space into a grand tableau that connects history with myth and with Rivera’s own conscious and unconscious desires.

In Mexico she became friendly with Rivera and fellow muralist Xavier Guerrero, as well as with museum director Fernando Gamboa.15 In her Rivera essay she described exiting a crowded Friedrichstrasse train station in bombed-out postwar Berlin, spotting in the ticketing hall the 1948 mural by East German painter Horst Strempel, and feeling in this “brown and gray” environment “homesickness” for Mexico’s colors, “the colors in its air and on its walls.”16 Writing in postwar Germany, where debates about abstract and representational art were heating up, she praised the Mexican muralists for creating works that could be understood by the largely illiterate masses. In a 1947 essay, “Die gemalte Zeit” (The painted time), she pointed out that Guerrero had learned commercial painting from his father and so had “useful, practical knowledge.” She began both essays with the idea that if fascists ever took control in Mexico, rather than burn books they would have to destroy murals. For Seghers, the Mexicans’ clear and imaginative renderings of a postcolonial society, informed by native arts and the history of European and “maybe even Chinese” art, transcended the divide between “pure and topical” art. By addressing their times and time in general, she argued while comparing José Guadalupe Posada to Honoré Daumier, both men had created an art that was timeless and timely, unifying and revolutionary.17

Seghers was granted Mexican citizenship in 1946 but returned to Germany in 1947. After the founding of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1949, she was persuaded to move to the East, join the Socialist Unity Party, and help to build the cultural infrastructure of the new Communist nation. She became president of the GDR’s Writers Union and was awarded the International Stalin Peace Prize in Moscow in 1952. She continued to produce a prolific stream of novels, stories, and essays and skillfully negotiated the precarious cultural politics of the GDR, maintaining a tenuous relationship to party orthodoxy.18 Her friendship with Brecht, also in East Berlin, continued, as did her correspondence with Lukács. She exercised considerable influence on the writer Christa Wolf, who published numerous interviews with and essays about Seghers, wrote the forward to the 1983 paperback edition of Seghers’s dissertation, and wrote the screenplay for the East German film based on Seghers’s 1949 novel Die Toten bleiben jung (The dead remain young).

In 2018 the Berlin School filmmaker Christian Petzold filmed Seghers’s 1944 novel Transit—a follow-up to The Seventh Cross that was less successful commercially but is generally held in higher regard literarily—adapting the narrative to pertain to the plight of today’s migrants and exiles. Fehervary characterizes Seghers as “the greatest German woman writer of the twentieth century” and states that “she takes her place in history alongside such women contemporaries as Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir.”19 Mexico contributed essential elements to Seghers’s achievement and legacy.

1. Kathleen J. LaBahn, Anna Seghers’ Exile Literature: The Mexican Years (1941–1947) (New York: Peter Lang, 1986), 6. For a complete listing of Heine Club events, see Christian Kloyber, “Der Heinrich-Heine-Club und der österreichische Exilsalon von Irma Römer” (2001), http:// www.literaturepochen .at/exil/multimedia/pdf /heinrichheineclub.pdf. See also “Die Gruendung des Heinrich Heine-Clubs in Mexico,” Freies Deutschland / Alemania libre 1, no. 2 (1941): 2.

2. Anna Seghers, “Abschied vom Heinrich-Heine-Klub,” in Über Kunstwerk und Wirklichkeit, vol. 1, Die Tendenz in der reinen Kunst (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1970), 207.

3. LaBahn, Anna Seghers’ Exile Literature, 33–47; and Anna Seghers, “Deutschland und wir” (1941), in Über Kunstwerk und Wirklichkeit, vol. 1, 186–91.

4. Anna Seghers, “Briefwechsel mit Georg Lukács,” in Über Kunstwerk und Wirklichkeit, vol. 1, 173–81, esp. 178–79 (on Marc and realism).

5. Fritz Pohle, “Das Rätsel um das wirkliche Blau,” in Fluchtort Mexiko: Ein Asylland für die Literatur, ed. Martin Heilscher (Hamburg: Luchterhand Literatur Verlag, 1992), 57; and Marcus G. Patka, Zu nahe der Sonne: Deutsche Schriftsteller in Mexico (Berlin: Aufbau Taschenbuch, 1999), 168–70.

6. Anna Seghers, “Christa Wolf spricht mit Anna Seghers” (1965), in Über Kunstwerk und Wirklichkeit, vol. 2, Erlebnis und Gestaltung (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1971), 38.

7. Ibid., 40; and Patka, Zu nahe der Sonne, 173.

8. Anna Seghers, “Bemerkungen zum ‘Siebten Kreuz,’” September 23, 1938, in Über Kunstwerk und Wirklichkeit, vol. 2, 16.

9. Harold Rosenberg, “On the Art of Escape” (1948), in Discovering the Present: Three Decades in Art, Culture, and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 300.

10. See Helen Fehervary, Anna Seghers: The Mythic Dimension (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001.

11. Ibid., 19.

12. Netty Reiling [Anna Seghers], Jude und Judentum im Werke Rembrandts (Leipzig: Verlag Philipp Reclam jun., 1983). On her course of study, which also included significant study of sinology and philosophy (with Karl Jaspers), see Fehervary, Anna Seghers, 20.

13. Fehervary, Anna Seghers, 7.

14. Ibid., 59.

15. Patka, Zu nahe der Sonne, 173.

16. Anna Seghers, “Diego Rivera” (1949), in Über Kunstwerk und Wirklichkeit, vol. 2, 86–87. For the Strempel mural, see https://www .mural.ch/index.php?kat _id=w&id2=2938.

17. Anna Seghers, “Die gemalte Zeit: Mexikanische Fresken” (1947), in Über Kunstwerk und Wirklichkeit, vol. 2, 69–73.

18. Christiane Zehl Romero, “Anna Seghers: 1900–1983,” in The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, Jewish Women’s Archive, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia /article/seghers-anna. Her collected works run to twentyfour volumes. Helen Fehervary and Bernhard Spies, eds., Anna Seghers—Werkausgabe im Aufbau-Verlag (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2000–2014). For a listing, see https://www.anna -seghers.de/buecher.php.

19. Fehervary, Anna Seghers, 3.