My dissertation examines Anna Seghers’s encounter with China and how this encounter influenced her life and her writing. By using materials available in the Anna-Seghers-Archive in Berlin, results of studies in various related disciplines such as sinology, history, and political science, etc., as well as historical and current Chinese sources, this dissertation seeks to reconstruct chronologically Anna Seghers’s intellectual involvement with China.
My research traces Seghers’ encounter with China back to her study of Chinese language and culture at the University of Heidelberg and her internship in the East Asian Art Museum in Cologne in the early 1920s. It illustrates that her early fascination with the cultural and political developments in China and her personal contact with several Chinese political refugees in Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s were essential for her intellectual involvement with China over the following 50 years.
As the first comprehensive study of its kind, this dissertation seeks to fill a void surrounding current research on Anna Seghers. The study will produce meaningful connections between Seghers’ intellectual pathways and literary activities as they intertwine with the writer’s encounter with another culture and nation. Findings from my research will inform future studies in contextualizing Seghers’ works within various cultural paradigms that played a role in the eventful career of the most prominent German woman writer of the twentieth century.