安娜·西格斯

安娜·西格斯（德语：Anna Seghers，德语：[ˈana ˈzeːɡɛʁs] ，1900年11月19日—1983年6月1日），德国女作家，以描述二战时期道德体验而知名。著有长篇小说《第七个十字架》《死者青春常在》等。1947年成为德国统一社会党成员，1950年迁居东德。1983年6月1日逝世于柏林。

Anna Reiling, known by the pen name Anna Seghers (German: [ˈana ˈzeːɡɛʁs] , 19 November 1900 – 1 June 1983), was a German writer. She was notable for exploring and depicting the moral experience of the Second World War. Born into a Jewish family and married to a Hungarian Communist, Seghers escaped Nazi-controlled territory through wartime France. She was granted a visa and gained ship's passage to Mexico, where she lived in Mexico City (1941–47).

She returned to Europe after the war, living in West Berlin (1947–50), which was occupied by Allied forces. She eventually settled in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), where she worked on cultural and peace issues. She received numerous awards and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1959, 1967, 1968, 1969 and 1972.

Reiling’s pseudonym is believed to be based on the surname of the Dutch painter and printmaker Hercules Pieterszoon Seghers or Segers (c. 1589 – c. 1638).

Life

Seghers was born Anna Reiling in Mainz in 1900 into a Jewish family. She was called "Netty". Her father, Isidor Reiling, was a dealer in antiques and cultural artefacts. From 1920 to 1924, she studied history, art history, and sinology at the universities of Cologne and Heidelberg. In 1924, she completed her studies at the University of Heidelberg under the name Netty Reiling with a doctoral thesis on Jews and Judaism in the work of Rembrandt (Jude und Judentum im Werke Rembrandts), in which she analyzed how Rembrandt did not merely use Judaism as a historical backdrop but endowed the Jewish element with genuine intrinsic value and inner depth within his pictorial compositions — standing in stark contrast to the antisemitic or stereotypical iconography of many of his contemporaries.

In 1925 she married László Radványi, also known as Johann-Lorenz Schmidt, a Hungarian Communist and academic, thereby acquiring Hungarian citizenship.

She joined the Communist Party of Germany in 1928. Her 1932 novel, Die Gefährten was a prophetic warning of the dangers of Nazism, for which she was arrested by the Gestapo. In 1932, she formally left the Jewish community. Her book, Revolt of the Fishermen of Santa Barbara, was banned and burned by the Nazi regime in 1933.

By 1934 she had emigrated, via Zürich, to Paris. After German troops invaded the French Third Republic in 1940, she fled to Marseilles, seeking to leave Europe. Her 1944 novel, Transit follows the travails of a fictional character in Marseilles seeking to emigrate.

One year later, she was granted an entry visa to Mexico and ship's passage. She took a ship from Marseille to Martinique. Settling in Mexico City, she founded the anti-fascist 'Heinrich-Heine-Klub', named after the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine. She also founded Freies Deutschland (Free Germany), an academic journal.

While still in Paris, in 1939, she had written The Seventh Cross. The anti-fascist novel is set in 1936 and describes the escape of seven political prisoners from a Nazi concentration camp in Germany. It was published in English in the United States in 1942 and quickly adapted for an American movie of the same name featuring Spencer Tracy with the screenplay by Helen Deutsch and direction by Fred Zinnemann. The Seventh Cross was one of the very few depictions of Nazi concentration camps, in either literature or the cinema, during World War II. In 1947 Seghers was awarded the Georg Büchner-Prize for this novel.