Anna Seghers, 1941 im Exil © Courtesy Everett Collection/Imago Images
The November pogroms of 1938 were a sign of dehumanization. The culture of remembrance should shake us up and work against hatred and persecution.
Anna Seghers, daughter of the art dealer Isidor Reiling and his wife Hedwig (ne. She was born in Mainz in November 1900 and was already literary productive during her studies (art history, history, sinology and philology in Cologne and Heidelberg). In 1925 she married the communist social scientist László Radványi (later: Johann-Lorenz Schmidt) from Hungary. The marriage gave rise to two children. She published her story “Uprising of the Fishermen in St. Barbara”, for which she received the Kleist Prize, in 1928 under the pseudonym Anna Seghers. In the same year, she joined the KPD. In her novel “Die Gefährten” (1932), Seghers warns of the impending fascism in Germany.
After she was briefly arrested in 1933 by the Secret State Police (Gestapo), she managed to escape to Paris. There she works in anti-fascist exile magazines, including the “Neue Deutsche Blätter” published in Prague.
In her first work in exile, the novel “Der Kopflohn”, she asks about the causes of National Socialism in Germany. 1940/41, when she is waiting in Marseille for the exit visa to Mexico, she begins the novel “Transit”. She flees on to Mexico via numerous stations.
In Mexican exile, she founded the anti-fascist Heinrich Heine Club as a German literary and cultural association and became its president and finished her best-known novel “The Seventh Cross”. In 1947 she returned to Germany and lived as a respected writer in the GDR from 1950. Anna Seghers participated in the World Peace Movement and was a member of the Presidium of the World Peace Council of the GDR. However, she questioned the system of the GDR over time. In the work “Der gerechte Richter” (1957) she dealt critically with the GDR. For political reasons, the novella was not published until 1990, after reunification.
As an honorary citizen of her hometown Mainz, Seghers dies on the 1st. June 1983 in East Berlin.
In the FRG their works were received hesitantly, in the GDR often one-sidedly. Today, Anna Seghers is considered one of the most important German-speaking storytellers of the 20th century.
Irmi Horn
Brigitta Demus was born in Hungary in Pápa. She studied piano at the music school Szombathely and the Franz Liszt Music Academy. In 2008 she graduated as a piano artist at the University of Music Cologne. She was twice a prize winner of the Hungarian national piano competition. She has lived in Graz for more than 10 years, teaches privately and in the MS Eggersdorf as a piano teacher and tutor, and regularly gives concerts.
Irma Servatius (Viola) is a native of Styria, but grew up in Boston, USA. She trained as a concert bellist at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, where she graduated with a master’s degree in 2006. She plays on a viola that was built especially for her by Marten Cornelissen in 2008. Among other things, she works with the music publisher “Musikproduktion Höflich” for which she writes introductions for editions of Musikraritäten. In 2015 she moved to Graz where she lives as a performer of all genres and as a composer and artist as a freelancer.
Brigitta Demus & Irma Servatius
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