Anna Seghers’s Transit is an existential, political, literary thriller that explores the agonies of boredom, the vitality of storytelling, and the plight of the exile with extraordinary compassion and insight. Having escaped from a Nazi concentration camp in Germany in 1937, and later a camp in Rouen, the nameless twenty-seven-year-old German narrator of Seghers’s multilayered masterpiece ends up in the dusty seaport of Marseille. Along the way he is asked to deliver a letter to a man named Weidel in Paris and discovers Weidel has committed suicide, leaving behind a suitcase containing letters and the manuscript of a novel. As he makes his way to Marseille to find Weidel’s widow, the narrator assumes the identity of a refugee named Seidler, though the authorities think he is really Weidel. There in the giant waiting room of Marseille, the narrator converses with the refugees, listening to their stories over pizza and wine, while also gradually piecing together the story of Weidel, whose manuscript has shattered the narrator’s “deathly boredom,” bringing him to a deeper awareness of the transitory world the refugees inhabit as they wait and wait for that most precious of possessions: transit papers.

A new translation of the best and most provocative short stories by the author of Transit and The Seventh Cross. Best known for the anti-fascist novel The Seventh Cross and the existential thriller Transit, Anna Seghers was also a gifted writer of short fiction. The stories she wrote throughout her life reflect her political activism as well as her deep engagement with myth; they are also some of her most formally experimental work. This selection of Seghers’s best stories, written between 1925 and 1965, displays the range of her creativity over the years. It includes her most famous short fiction, such as the autobiographical “The Dead Girls’ Class Trip,” and others, like “Jans Is Going to Die,” that have been translated into English here for the first time. There are psychologically penetrating stories about young men corrupted by desperation and women bound by circumstance, as well as enigmatic tales of bewilderment and enchantment based on myths and legends, like “The Best Tales of Woynok, the Thief,” “The Three Trees,” and “Tales of Artemis.” In her stories, Seghers used the German language in especially unconventional and challenging ways, and Margot Bettauer Dembo’s sensitive and skilled translation preserves this distinction.

Seghers wrote Transit while living in exile, fleeing her Nazi persecutors. The novel captures the moods and motives of refugees from Hitler's Germany attempting to leave France via the seaport of Marseilles between the French capitulation in 1940 and the Spring of 1941. The story is told from the perspective of an unnamed narrator, a German engine-fitter who has escaped from a Nazi concentration camp (in fact, for the second time) and fled to Paris. Here he encounters a fellow escapee who asks him to deliver papers to a German writer called Weidel. The narrator finds Weidel already dead and assumes his identity, hoping to make use of his visa for Mexico. When he reaches Marseilles to avoid recapture he adds the papers of another deceased German, one Seidler, so from this point onwards he is juggling with three separate identities: those of Weidel, Seidler, and his own.

A fascinating study of one of the greatest German woman writers of the twentieth century

Fiction. Latinx Studies. African & African American Studies. THREE WOMEN OF HAITI, first published in German in 1980, is the final work by the great German writer, Anna Seghers. The three stories of the triptych concern women caught up in historical events across almost 500 years of Haitian history, beginning with the time of Christopher Columbus's exploratory voyages to the New World and ending in the 1970s with the repressive measures of the BÃ(c)bÃ(c) Doc Duvalier regime. These three uncompromising portrayals of women caught up in life-threatening situations form Anna Seghers's testimony work, demonstrating her lifelong concern as a revolutionary writer to give voice to those marginalized in history. Also included here is the 1948 essay Seghers wrote about the life of Toussaint Louverture and his pivotal role in the Haitian Revolution.

This book begins to recover the global history of solidarity as a principle of authorship, taking Anna Seghers (1900-1983) as an exemplar and reading her alongside prominent contemporaries: Brecht, Carpentier, and Spivak.

The essays collected in this book focus on the multi-faceted relationship between German/Austrian literature and the cinema screen. Scholars from Ireland, Great Britain, Germany, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Portugal, USA and Canada present critical readings of a wide range of transpositions of German-language texts to film, while also considering the impact of cinema on German literature, exploring intertextualities as well as intermedialities. The forum of discussion thus created encompasses cinematic narratives based on Goethe’s Faust, Kleist’s Marquise of O..., Kubrick’s film version of Schnitzler’s Dream Story and Caroline Link’s Oscar-winning adaptation of Stefanie Zweig’s novel Nowhere in Africa. The wide-ranging analyses of the complex interaction between literature and film presented here focus on literary works by Anna Seghers, Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, Nicola Rhon, Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll, Elfriede Jelinek, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Erich Hackl, Thomas Brussig, Sven Regener, Frank Goosen and Robert Schneider, as well as on adaptations by filmmakers such as Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Max Mack, Josef von Sternberg, Max W. Kimmich, Fred Zinnemann, Paul Wegener, Alexander Kluge, Volker Schlöndorff, Hansjürgen Pohland, Hendrik Handloegten, Michael Haneke, Christoph Stark, Karin Brandauer, Joseph Vilsmaier, Leander Haußmann and Doris Dörrie.

A varied, vivid view of the literary culture of the often-neglected interwar Austrian republic. The literary flair of fin-de-siècle Vienna lived on after 1918 in the First Austrian Republic even as writers grappled with the consequences of a lost war and the vanished Habsburg Empire. Reacting to historical and political issues often distinct from those in Weimar Germany, Austrian literary culture, though frequently associated with Jewish writers deeply attached to the concept of an independent Austria, reflected the republic's ever-deepening antisemitism and the growing clamor for political union with Germany. Spanning the two momentous decades between the fall of the empire in 1918 and the Nazi Anschluss in 1938, this book explores work by canonical writers suchas Schnitzler, Kraus, Roth, and Werfel and by now-forgotten figures such as the pacifist Andreas Latzko, the arch-Nazi Bruno Brehm, and the fervently Jewish Soma Morgenstern. Also taken into account are Ernst Weiss's "Hitler" novel Der Augenzeuge and 1930s works about First Republic Austria by the German Communist writers Anna Seghers and Friedrich Wolf. Andrew Barker's book paints a varied and vivid picture of one of the most challenging and underresearched periods in twentieth-century cultural history. Andrew Barker is Emeritus Professor of Austrian Studies at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.