“You Are My Best Friends in the Whole World”: Anna Seghers and the Soviet Writers’ Union

The writer Anna Seghers (1900-1983) is a crucial figure in the literature of the GDR and a major participant in the post-war Soviet-German dialogue. Until recently, researchers, both German and Russian, had little interest in her. In German, the American Germanist of Austrian origin K. Zehl Romero published her most complete biography and two volumes of selected letters. In Russian German studies, there are no fundamental studies of the life and work of Seghers. This article presents the history of Seghers’s relations with the Soviet Writers’ Union in the post-war period. Seghers regularly came to the USSR at the invitation of the SWU, the Committee for International Lenin Prizes, or on her initiative, not only for creative purposes but also for recreation and treatment. The writer corresponded with a large number of Soviet authors and literary scholars (T.L. Motyleva, L. Kopelev, V. Stezhensky, I. Ehrenburg, et al.). The collaboration between the German writer and the SWU was defined by both parties as “friendship.” Based on letters preserved in two archives (in the Moscow RGALI and the Berlin Anna-Seghers-Archive), the article examines the main lines of the writer’s relations with her Soviet colleagues. Despite the fact that in the history of post-war Soviet-German contacts the concept of friendship, being the ideological dominant of the cultural policy of the USSR, meant business partnership, the author of the article comes to the conclusion about truly warm and trusting relations between Seghers and her Soviet friends.