Anna Seghers

Contents

Note on Translations

Note on Orthography

Chronology of Seghers’s Life and Works

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

Part 1: The Seventh Cross: Origins, Relevance, Adaptations

 1 Topographies of Escape, Flight, and Migration in Seghers’s Prose

 Helen Fehervary

 2 Heroes: The Seventh Cross and Seghers’s “Heldenbuch”

 Christiane Zehl Romero

 3 Allusions to the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish-Christian Gospel and Apostolic Narratives in The Seventh Cross

 Helen Fehervary

 4  The Seventh Cross: Dignité humaine and Human Rights

 Birgit Maier-Katkin

 5  The Seventh Crossand Fred Zinnemann’s Cinematic Adaptation

 Peter Beicken

 6 Expressionism in Pictures: Exploring William Sharp’s Comic Adaptation of The Seventh Cross

 Kristy Boney

Part 2: From the Historical Avant-Garde to Socialism and Antifascism

 7 Netty Reiling’s Student Years at the University of Heidelberg

 Christiane Zehl Romero

 8 Die Gefährten: Poised Aesthetically between Modernism and Lukácsian Socialist Realism and Politically between Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin

 Katerina Clark

 9 Narrative Approaches to the Holocaust: A Pivotal Decade in Seghers’s Oeuvre

 Helen Fehervary

 10 The French Connection: Seghers’s Friendships and Work Relationships in and with France

 Christiane Zehl Romero

 11 Seghers’s Efforts to Write about Postwar Germany

 Ute Brandes

 12 Anna Seghers, Walter Janka, Wolfgang Harich, and the Events of

 Stephen Brockmann

Part 3: Seghers and her Contemporaries

 13 Visual Encounters: Seghers, Kafka, and Benjamin

 Peter Beicken

 14 Notes on Seghers and Adorno: Marxism, Post-Fascism, and the Question of Culture

 Hunter Bivens

 15 “Die herrliche Anna Seghers”: Her Role for Christa Wolf and Brigitte Reimann

 Christiane Zehl Romero

 16 “… diese unerträgliche Sehnsucht”: Life Journeys and Longing in Reimann, Seghers, and Wolf

 Jennifer Marston William

 17 Heiner Müller’s Three Confessions: Late Letters to His Father, His Grandfather, and His Literary Mother Anna Seghers

 Janine Ludwig

Part 4: Seghers in Translation

 18 Introduction to The Wayfarers: Chapter One

 Hunter Bivens

 19 Introduction to “Shelter”

 Helen Fehervary

 20 Introduction to “The Reed”

 Amy Kepple Strawser

Index