Review: Anna Seghers' DIe Entscheidung

I have always been interested in postwar German fiction that deals with the American occupation, so I was eager to read Anna Seghers' 1959 novel Die Entscheidung (The Decision). But I have to admit it was a bit of a slog to make it through all 600 pages of Seghers experiment in Stalinist socialist realism. Disappointing, really, since Seghers is a fantastic story-teller as we know from her anti-fascist exile novels Das siebte Kreuz (The Seventh Cross - made into a Hollywood feature film) and Transit (Transit Visa).

Christa Wolf recalled a meeting a meeting in the early days of the GDR between Anna Seghers and Walter Ulbricht - the Secretary of the ruling SED party - when Ulbricht challenged the Genosse Schriftsteller (comrade writers) to write socialist masterpieces about collective farms, socialist industrialization and even a "socialist Faust". I don't believe that Seghers ever attempted a "socialist Faust", but with Die Enstsheidung she rose to the challenge of depicting socialist industrialization and in the process wrote the first major novel about a divided Germany. 

Die Entscheidung takes place in the early days of the GDR and the BRD.  Germany is split into the American-dominated west and the socialist SBZ (Soviet Occupied Zone) and the division is much more than an arbitrary line on a map: Seghers sees it as an existential divide, much like her friend Christa Wolf did a few years  later in her classic GDR novel Der geteilte Himmel (Divided Heaven).  But in Die Entscheidung the borders are still quite porous; characters move relentlessly between east and west and make conscious decisions whether to remain in the east and build a new socialist reality or flee to west where the Marshall Plan is beginning to provide real material wealth at the dawn of the Wirtschaftswunder.

Seghers novel is a huge panorama of postwar Germany, with other plot strands in Mexico (where Seghers spent her exile years) and New York.  The novel has so many different characters that it took me the first two hundred pages to begin to get them straight, and then new characters are introduced by Seghers to represent different political-ideological concepts.  The basic plot is a very clever construct to illustrate the divided Germany.  Otto Bentheim was a steel magnate who, before the war, had plants in the west and in the east (the fictional town of Kossin). Bentheim's mills were crucial for the Nazi war effort, and his son was a big-shot SS officer.  After the war, Bentheim's plant in the west is rebuilt with American assistance to begin a new rearmament effort for imperialistic wars, while the plant Kossin is transformed into a VEB (Volks-Eigener Betrieb - People's-Owned Enterprise).  Meanwhile, the CIA enlists the aid of some engineers to sabotage the efforts of the workers in Kossin.

The main characters are three Germans who met while fighting against Franco in the Spanish Civil War: Robert Lohse - the representative of the proletariat in the novel, Richard Hagen - the communist resistance fighter who becomes a party leader in the new GDR, and Herbert Melzer - a writer who is sent by an American magazine to write about postwar Germany.  All three had lost sight of each other during the chaos of the war, but their lives intersect in surprising ways in the novel.  It quickly becomes clear in Die Entscheidung who the "good guys" are: veterans of the Spanish Civil War or those who were incarcerated in concentration camps during the NS-period.  Without exception, those characters who had been Nazi sympathizers throw their lot in with the Americans.

Robert Lohse is the central hero of Die Entscheidung, and Seghers paints a more complex psychological portrait.  Lohse is uneducated and has zero knowledge of political theory, but he is an instinctive socialist, who, for Seghers, represents the promise of a new, socialist, Germany. Actually, Lohse had initially joined the NSDAP since he was attracted to the fake socialist rhetoric.  But he inevitably "does the right thing" and makes rebuilding the steel mill in Kossin his life's mission.  By the end of the novel Lohse is so convinced that the German Democratic Republic is on the right path that he turns in his love interest - Lene Nohl - after she had confessed to him her plans to flee to the west (what a guy!).

The novel tends to get bogged down in the Kossin sections with endless discussions of production quotas and scenes of workers sitting together to discuss how to build a more perfect socialist future.  There are a few Russian figures, but they are for the most part ciphers, who look down on the German workers with bemused condescension as they struggle with developing a higher, socialist consciousness.  It is a given, in Die Entscheidung, that the Russians had long since achieved real socialism and so operate on a much higher plane than their German counterparts.  And any atrocities committed by the Soviet Red Army in the "liberation" of eastern Germany - such as the mass rape of German girls and women - are never mentioned. But, to her credit, Seghers does acknowledge the discrepancy between the growing material prosperity of the west and the severe deprivations in the east.  In one scene, a worker-agitator in the Kossin plant lays lays into some workers who grumbled that people in the west had a "better life ("mehr vom Leben"):

Und ich sage dir, Kumpel, hier has du auf jeden Fall mehr vom Leben.  Es gehört dir, verstehst du? Was du lebst – dir! Was du tust, was du anpackst.  Das Land gehört dir. Da drüben , allerdings, ist vieles besser und billiger. Margarine, Schuhe, Wollstoff, verstehst du das unter “mehr vom Leben”?  - Nein. Aber dich stören die Fehler, die bein uns gemacht werden. (Let me tell you something good buddy: you've got a much better life here. It belongs to you, don't you understand?  Your life is - yours! Whatever you do, what ever you take up.  The country belongs to you.  Sure, over there there is much that is better and cheaper. Margarine, shoes, wool - is that what you mean by a better life?  No.  But you get upset by the mistakes that we make here) 

The novel picks up speed when the scenes shift to the west; the portraits of the Bentheim dynasty members are good, as are the descriptions of the (for the most part, duplicitous) Americans. One of the most sympathetic characters is the old industrialist Castricius, a representative of the pre-war Bildungsbürgertum, and a much more paternalistic capitalism than the US-imperialist variety.  For the most part, the women in the novel are portrayed as weak figures, whose Entscheidungen - decisions - are heavily influenced by their husbands or boyfriends.  The exception is the American Helen Wilcox, the most intriguing character in the novel, who is attracted to the writer Herbert Melzer and gathers the courage to leave her husband, an executive at the Bentheim plant, as she is repulsed by his ruthless opportunism. 

I have always been fascinated by early postwar German literature - especially fiction dealing with the American occupation.  Die Entscheidung is an important literary document from that period. Seghers shows a country that is still in ruins, the people living in makeshift shelters and still psychologicaly brutalized by the Nazi dictatorship and war.  It is these vivid descriptions, as well as the sheer scope of the novel, that elevate Die Entscheidung above the dreary socialist realism of the period.  Seghers wrote a sequel, Das Vertrauen, that deals with the East Berlin uprising of 1953 and the death of Stalin. 

Comments

[hattie]

It was a real dilemma for dedicated leftists. Most people just wanted the best material circumstances they could get, and that would have been in the West. The intellectuals were pets of the regime, of course. It's all very sad.
I don't think I could read the Seghers without becoming very upset for everyone.

[Katy]

Interesting review, David. I've always enjoyed Seghers' earlier writing, and I can even stomach the later short stories. Have you read "Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen"? That's a very moving look at the fates of her old classmates, Jews and "Aryans" alike.

You might enjoy Werner Bräunig's "Rummelplatz", another long one. It was banned in the GDR for being too unflattering of the working class.

[David]

Katy, thanks for the tip on Rummelplatz.

Yes, Ausflug is superb. I also like Segher's stories about Mexico...

[Katy]

Or perhaps "Transit" might even be available in English at some point. New Books in German recommends the book as its latest "forgotten gem":
www.new-books-in-german.com/english/412/225/225/129002/design1.html

[David]

I had assumed Transit had been translated, given the enormous popularity of The Seventh Cross and the "Cassablanca"-like atmosphere of the novel.

But I'm all in favor of a Seghers revival. There are many "forgotten gems" in her oeuvre.

[Jordan 5]

A lot will come out over time but the truth has been out there for a long time as well but that doesn't give you what you want so this dance just goes on and on.