_full_alt_author_running_head (neem stramien B2 voor dit chapter en dubbelklik nul hierna en zet 2 auteursnamen neer op die plek met and): 0 _full_articletitle_deel (kopregel rechts, vul hierna in): Anna Seghers, The Wayfarers: Chapter One _full_article_language: en indien anders: engelse articletitle: 0

Anna Seghers, The Wayfarers: Chapter One 325

Chapter 18 Anna Seghers, The Wayfarers: Chapter One

Introduced and Translated by Hunter Bivens

Never before translated into English, Die Gefährten, rendered here as The Way­ farers, was Anna Seghers’s first full-length novel, published in October 1932 on the eve of the National Socialist regime. As discussed in Chapters One and Eight earlier in this volume, the novel is set in the aftermath of the revolution- ary wave that followed World War One. It begins with the defeat of the Hungar- ian Soviet Republic, and follows a group of Hungarian, Italian, Bulgarian, Chinese, and Polish revolutionaries, political prisoners, and refugees dispersed across Europe over the next decade. Woven through the tales of this revolu- tionary diaspora are narratives of working class struggles from across the globe, from Berlin to Moscow to China, with Warsaw, the Carpathian Mountains, and factories of northern Italy in between. The Wayfarers is a singular contribution to the mid-twentieth century attempt to create a popular and political imagi- nary for working-class internationalism. It is notable as well for its early depic- tion of the nascent European fascism of the 1920s, since the counterrevolutions of these years in Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland, Italy, and elsewhere were charac- terized by the same rule through physical terror that became the hallmark of National Socialism in power. The Wayfarers is a book about perseverance in the face of defeat. Its characters move through the peripheries of society, through cramped slums and prison cells, but are nevertheless connected through a vast and global revolutionary network.1 Siegfried Kracauer described the book as a “contemporary martyr chronicle,” and the fates of Seghers’s characters seem to foreshadow what was to come after 1933.2 The novel’s first chapter, translated here, depicts the final hours of the Hun- garian Soviet Republic of 1919, portraying the attempts of revolutionaries to flee over the border before falling into the hands of the reaction. Some succeed; many do not, and these pages are rife with portraits of heroism,

1 On this spatial dynamic of twentieth-century proletarian-revolutionary literature, see Fredric Jameson, “Forward: A Monument to Radical Instants,” in Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance, vol. 1, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), xxvii-xxviii. 2 Siegfried Kracauer, “Eine Märtyrer-Chronik von heute” (Frankfurter Zeitung Literaturblatt, November 13, 1932), in Werke, vol. 5.4, ed. Inka Mülder-Bach (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2011), 269.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004409811_020 326 Bivens humiliation, and brutality. Seghers was familiar with first-hand accounts of these days through her husband László Radványi, who had participated in the Budapest Sunday Circle around Béla Balász and Georg Lukács and fled to Vi- enna after the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in August 1919. Although it would be a mischaracterization to describe the novel as a roman à clef, many of its characters have historical and biographical antecedents in the group around the Sunday Circle, as Helen Fehervary has established in her work on Seghers. Thus, the young student Böhm is modeled on Radványi himself, Bató on Lukács, and the intellectual Steiner on Karl Mannheim.3 Written in a sparse but evocative style, sometimes compared to Kafka’s prose, the passages of The Wayfarers convey at once a sober epic distance from the pathos of the events they depict, while flashing forth with moments of po- etic detail that shock the reader into the present of the narrative. With this novel, Seghers first developed her unique technique of narrative montage, tacking cinematically between storylines and narrative perspectives in order to link characters and narrative arcs less through their direct interactions than indirectly, through their involvement in a common cause and a shared move- ment, developing a mode of emplotment that is more of a network than a sin- gular narrative. At the same time, Seghers is a teller of stories, and she does not differentiate between the major and minor. This method of composition lends to Seghers’s novels the chronicle-like character evoked by Kracauer, as noted above, and developed later in greater depth by Walter Benjamin, for whom the chronicler comes to stand as a figure for a redemptive conception of history.4

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. “Anna Seghers, A Chronicle of Germany’s Unemployed.” Selected Writings. Volume 4, 1938-1940, 126-134. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2003. Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller.” Selected Writings. Volume 3, 1935-1938, 143-166. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2002. Fehervary, Helen. Anna Seghers: The Mythic Dimension. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001.

3 Helen Fehervary, Anna Seghers: The Mythic Dimension (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 95. 4 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Selected Writings, vol. 3, 1935-1938, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2002), 143-166; and Walter Benjamin, “Anna Seghers, A Chronicle of Germany’s Unemployed,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2003), 126-134.