Anna Seghers’s “The End” and Fascist Subjectivity

The essay examines Anna Seghers's "The End." The story originally appeared in 1946 with two other tales that dealt largely with the National Socialist dictatorship from the vantage point of its victims; "The End" focused on the mentality of the perpetrators. As the essay describes, the story depicts the flight and suicide of a former camp guard as a narrative of retribution, The guard has, as it were, outlived his own death, a useless remainder of a defeated National Socialism, and his demise stands for the punishment of perpetrators and the possibility of a more just society in National Socialism's wake. Yet, the uncanny tonality of the text, borrowing from the traditions of German Romanticism, belies the optimism of this message, hinting that the social conditions of fascism and the attitudes, attachments, and desires that sustained Hitler's regime may prove more enduring than the National Socialist state itself.