"A Man Becomes a Nazi" - 10 Pages-A Short Story by Anna Seghers - 1943 - translated from the German by Margot Bettauer Dembo - 2021

 "A Man Becomes a Nazi" - A Short Story by Anna Seghers -  - - 1943 - 

translated from the German and edited by Margot Bettauer Dembo.- 2021

This will be my 12th year as a participant in Germans Literature Month, held every November.  Through the event I have discovered many new to me authors.

Born: November 19, 1900, Mainz, Germany

Died: June 1, 1983 (age 82 years), East Berlin

Born Netty Reiling in Mainz in 1900 of partly Jewish descent, she married Laszlo Radvanyi, a Hungarian Communist in 1925.

In Cologne and Heidelberg she studied history, the history of art and Chinese. She joined the Communist Party of Germany in 1928, at the height of its struggle against the burgeoning National Socialist German Workers Party. Her 1932 novel, Die Gefährten was a prophetic warning of the dangers of Fascism, which led to her being arrested by the gestapo.

 After German troops invaded the French Third Republic in 1940, she fled to Marseilles and one year later to Mexico, where she founded the anti-fascist 'Heinrich-Heine-Klub', named after the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, and founded Freies Deutschland (Free Germany), an academic journal. During this time, she wrote The Seventh Cross, for which she received the Büchner-Prize in 1947. The novel is set in 1936 and describes the escape of seven prisoners from a concentration camp. It was published in the United States in 1942 and produced as a movie in 1944 by MGM starring Spencer Tracy. The Seventh Cross was one of the very few depictions of Nazi concentration camps, in either literature or the cinema, during World War 

In 1947, Anna Seghers returned to Germany, moved to West Berlin, and became a member of the SED in the zone occupied by the Soviets. In 1950, she moved to East Berlin and became a co-founder of the freedom movement of the GDR. In 1951, she received the first Nationalpreis der DDR and the "Ehrendoktorwürde der Universität Jena" in 1959. In 1981, she became "Ehrenbürgerin" of her native town Mainz.

During prior German Literature Months I have posted upon two of her novels, Transit and The Seventh Cross.

“A Man Becomes a Nazi,” written in 1942 and 1943 in Mexico, explores the question: How does a person become a torturer and murderer? Within a tightly controlled narrative frame, the story ventures out into unstable terrain. Fritz Mueller’s life unrolls in front of a Red Army tribunal: “He was charged with shootings, hangings, and a series of acts of cruelty committed against women and children.

  This German, the fourth son of a soldier and unemployed metalworker, is born into a continuum of war and hardship. It is impossible to say what plays the greatest role in making him a Nazi—his circumstances, his education, his predispositions?. He becomes a cold blooded killer in a war against people he thought were enemies of Germany.

There are 15 other stories in the collection. I hope to post this month upon a few of them.

Mel u

The Reading Life