Anna Seghers

German writer famous for depicting the moral experience of the Second World War. After living in Mexico City (1941–1947) and West Berlin (1947-1950), Anna Seghers eventually settled in the GDR. Seghers was nominated for the 1967 Nobel Prize in Literature by the German Academy of Arts. The pseudonym Anna Seghers was apparently based on the surname of the Dutch painter and printmaker Hercules Pieterszoon Seghers or Segers (c. 1589-1638).

While in Paris in 1939 she had written The Seventh Cross, for which she received the Büchner-Prize in 1947. The novel is set in 1936 and describes the escape of seven prisoners from a concentration camp. It was published in the United States in 1942 and produced as a movie in 1944 by MGM starring Spencer Tracy. The Seventh Cross was one of the very few depictions of Nazi concentration camps, in either literature or the cinema, during World War II.

Seghers's best-known story, The Outing of the Dead Girls (1946), written in Mexico, was an autobiographical reminiscence of a pre-World War I class excursion on the Rhine river in which the actions of the protagonist's classmates are seen in light of their decisions and ultimate fates during both world wars. In describing them, the German countryside, and her soon-to-be destroyed hometown Mainz, Seghers gives the reader a strong sense of lost innocence and the senseless injustices of war, from which there proves to be no escape, whether or not you sympathized with the NSDAP (Nazi Party). Other notable Seghers stories include Sagen von Artemis (1938) and The Ship of the Argonauts (1953), both based on myths.

Seghers received the Georg Büchner Prize in 1947, the first Nationalpreis der DDR in 1951, and the Stalin Peace Prize in 1951. She died in Berlin on 1 June 1983 at age 82.