Between the Pedagogical and the Performative: Personal Stories, Public Narratives, and Social Critique in Anna Seghers's Überfahrt1

In her writing, Anna Seghers consistently describes how the communal sharing of personal experience via storytelling creates a critical public sphere.2 Scholars have noted that Seghers's celebrated exile work Transit (1944) is a particularly strong example of the political power of shared personal narratives.3 In this novel, refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe share stories about their exile experiences while waiting at the port of Marseille to obtain travel documents. Through their stories, the exiles document an identity crisis marked by the loss of public reference points around which to order their lives (Thielking 127; Barkhoff 218). Yet the narratives also offer the exiles new models for identification. As they make connections between their stories and an archaic-mythical worldview, they are reassured of their position within history (228). As Jurgen Barkhoff writes, placing collective personal experience within a mythical historical frame offers the exiles "Vertrautheitsbedingungen"-or conditions of familiarity-in the midst of chaos (229). Seghers reframes the individual exile experiences by locating them within a communal history rather than by emphasizing the loss of personal identity. This strategy serves a crucial political purpose in that it creates a public story of anti-fascism that stands in opposition to a National Socialist appropriation of historical-mythical narratives that had come to order German public life (Gutzmann, "Bei Gelegenheit" 178-79). Seghers's emphasis on the political relevance of personal narratives in Transit also informs her later, lesser-known novel Uberfahrt (1971). Written when Seghers was a figurehead in the East German literary establishment, Uberfahrt can be read as a thematic and theoretical counterpart to Transit, completed during her exile in France and Mexico. In both novels, a trans-Atlantic voyage (or the longing for one) creates the impetus for storytelling as characters reflect on what the journey means for them. Just as the exiles' stories in Transit can be considered Seghers's contribution to an anti-fascist imaginary that could shape postwar Germany, the transformation of Franz and Ernst described in Uberfahrt implies that the practice of sharing personal stories can critique and effect change within an East German public sphere (181). So far, critics of Uberfahn have not paid enough attention to the critical and transformative potential of the shared personal experiences at the core of the work. Instead, they have generally read the novel either in terms of its support or rejection of GDR dogma.4 Thus examinations of the work before reunification focused on the ship's return to East Germany as proof that Seghers embraced state socialism. On the other hand, post-reunification readings seek to demonstrate that Seghers's later work, which does not directly thematize GDR reality, reflects her withdrawal from, and ultimately rejection of an increasingly oppressive official ideology. In the 1990s, scholars such as Thomas Fox, Elizabeth Mittmann, and David Bathrick began to problematize these established paradigms for GDR literature which were also applied to Seghers's Uberfahn.5 Specifically, these scholars critique the tendency to grant legitimacy only to those texts that reject GDR ideology, while dismissing those that do not as compromised. Rather than viewing texts as either unblemished or contaminated by GDR ideology, they call for analyses of East German literature that would pay attention to the way in which a text functions within a specific political setting (Bathrick, The Powers of Speech 10-12). As Bathrick states, interpretations of GDR texts should "focus on the discursive framework of literary and cultural life within East Germany and its relation to the struggles on the part of a number of literary and cultural intellectuals to open up alternative spaces within that framework" (2). My reading of Uberfahn takes seriously these scholars' arguments to consider GDR writers "not simply as victims of Stalinism or Western cultural imperialism, not as Stasi agents, but as heterogeneous, discursively inscribed bodies" (Mittmann 34). …