Aesthetics and Gender: Anna Seghers as a Case Study

Anna Seghers, one of Germany's most prolific, widely read and translated authors, offers a case study of how literary aesthetics and authorial gender figure in critical reception. Praised in the l920s and l930s for depicting social conflicts in powerful prose, Seghers has been critiqued more recently for failing to depict women as powerful figures in those conflicts. Similarly, work written after Seghers's postwar return to the GDR was largely ignored by critics in the West during the Cold War period, while in the East the author's status and visibility was tantamount to that of a cultural icon. This essay reviews the shifting grounds that critics have used to allege Seghers's political incorrectness and suggests reconsidering the author's aesthetics as emanating from social, not socialist realism, her personal and authorial economy, not her ideological positions. Particularly Seghers's short stories reveal the limits on women's options for effective action and the realistic constraints imposed upon them by the spectrum of societies in which they live.