A Female Writer From the GDR

 “Crossing – A Love Story” by Anna Seghers, 1971

This short novel was written by the top female writer in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), who became famous during the Weimar period as a youth.  Seghers was a long-time member of the Communist Party / Socialist Unity Party but resisted their command to write socialist realist prose.  She favored modernist methods instead, considering them to be as worthy as socialist realism.  

I’m not sure from this sample if this is an improvement.  There is little modernism here except the story within the story.  This straight-forward novel is like a hundred other novels about unrequited love – not that I have read those books. It seems entirely conventional, and could be a love story on the NYT best-seller lists.  I would have preferred more social content.

It is a man's life-story told to a fellow passenger on a Polish ship crossing the Atlantic from Salvador in Bahia, Brazil to Brunsbüttel, Germany in the 1950s.  A doctor, Ernest, buttonholes an engineer, Franz on deck and begins to describe his long love affair with a young girl he met in Rio, Maria, that continues to haunt him up to the day he came onboard.  Like Franz, we the reader are trapped in the telling as the ship glides by prison islands, dolphins and flying fish, crosses the equator and transits under the stars of the Southern Cross and then Ursa Minor. 

Franz is a listener, much like the reader is forced to be a listener. At first, Franz wonders why Ernest is telling him this intimate story, but gradually, like the reader, he wants to find out what the hell happened.  It is an 18 day voyage after all.  The book is shorter than that thankfully.

Segher’s herself was in exile from Europe during the Nazi period in Germany, living in Latin America and Mexico.  She crossed the Atlantic via ship 3 times, twice to Brazil, so the story comes out of those experiences. The exoticism of Brazil is apparent to any European reader – its foods, climate, religions and people - which is why Europeans might have read this book, and not just for the love story.  The side trip to Bahia and its African-American population is more exoticism.  Yet this is not B. Traven.  There is no class struggle, just pity for the poor.  Seghers was mentioned in the film 'Goodbye Lenin' in a nostalgic way, so she's not an unknown quantity. 

The plot, to be short, is that Ernest met Maria as a young boy in Rio, they grew close, he returned to Germany after the war to study and get money for her to follow, and he waited too long.  Maria finally got married, either committed suicide or died in an accident, or did not die but faked her own death.  It’s a mystery and Ernest could never figure out which story was true. The upshot was his love was never realized due to his slowness and abandonment of Maria.  After Franz hears the end of the story, he tells Ernest to forget this damaging life-long obsession and go on and find another woman. Life is short, yes? 

The background to the tale is World War II, the liquidation of the Jews, the formation of the GDR by socialists and anti-fascists and so on, but only as historic ‘color’ in the background. The central drama is an individual’s unrequited love, or actually two people’s failed romance. This is a standard plot in the U.S.  It is a somewhat sad story that will leave little impact except to remind you that love, like everything else, is not forever, and timing is key. Go for it or make up your mind not too, but do not pine like Ernest … unless, like him, you can’t stop. 

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “GDR,” “Brazil,” “Socialist Realism” or ‘love.’

And I got it at May Day’s excellent used and cutout section, which has fiction!

Kultur Kommissar / March 5, 2025 - Happy International Working Women's Day!