
You are cordially invited to a lecture at 3:30 p.m. on Monday, November 5, 2012
in the Barbara Tootle Room, Ohio Union, main campus
Professor Ute Brandes (Amherst College)
The Writer Anna Seghers's Difficult Journey - from Exile in Mexico City to Postwar Berlin
After her French and Mexican exile from Hitler Germany, Anna Seghers (1900-1983) returned to the devastated urban landscape of Berlin in 1947. Among her early texts, protocols, anecdotes, and fragments from that time is some of the most radical post-war literature written in German. Confronting themes that were taboo in the Soviet zone, these texts remained mostly unpublished. Ute Brandes will discuss Seghers’ literary, political, and aesthetic intentions, formulated in Mexico, and the realities she found in Berlin in the context of German “rubble literature.”