Anna Seghers was the most noted prose writer of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) and, according to many critics, one of the most important German writers of the modern period. Such novels as Das siebte Kreuz (1942; translated as The Seventh Cross, 1942) and Transit (1948; originally published as Visado de tránsito, 1944; translated into English, 1944) and her stories "Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen"(1946; translated as "The Excursion of the Dead Girls", 1978), "Die Kraft der Schwachen" (The Strength of the Weak, 1965), and Das wirkliche Blau (1967; translated as "Benito's Blue", 1973) earned her a wide reading audience internationally as well, and the combined weight of her reputation at home and abroad established her as one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century.

Seghers's life and career were committed to the ideals of socialist humanism and the struggle for social change. Considering the political orientation of her writing...