The excursion of the dead girls

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The Excursion of the Dead Girls is a story by Anna Seghers with autobiographical references, written around 1944 and published in New York in 1946 . It is about the memories of the narrator "Netty", who lives in exile in Mexico, of a school excursion before the First World War and of the fate of the girls up to the end of the Second World War. This creates a broad picture of society in the first half of the 20th century.

content

In the framework story, the first-person narrator lives in a village in Mexico after months of illness, longing for the end of the war and her return home. From her hostel, downhill, she sees the white wall of a ranch , which is a magical attraction for her. When walking through an “incision in the stockade made of cacti” “in the glow of a tropical midday”, she is transported back to the past world of her youth before the First World War, like in a “Fata Morgana” .

This is where the internal narrative begins , the retrospective: in a green garden she sees, in a vision, her two best friends from her school days, Leni and Marianne, swinging on a seesaw amid buttercups, dandelions, cranesbills and brownish-pink trembling grass. Then the elderly teacher Miss Mees, who decades later will be protected from the Nazi cross by her black cross of “the confessional church” on her necklace, calls out “Netty!” And she walks to the restaurant's coffee terrace, which is resting on a white wall. Her class, a "swarm of girls [..] squeaky and elf", goes on a trip down the Rhine from Mainz with the teachers Mees and Sichel . The review begins in the excursion business and ends after the twenty-minute return journey upstream on the steamer with the way through the city to the narrator's apartment. She is amazed at the churches, houses and wells that have not been destroyed, as it were in a backward-running film into an ideal world, and so she hopes to meet her mother too.

At the beginning of the review, the narrator's comrades are described in their behavior and personality over coffee and cake. In doing so, the narrator is still fulfilling the task of her teacher, Fräulein Sichel, to carefully describe the school excursion for the next German lesson three decades later. Miss Sichel approached Netty because the girl likes to write essays. The result is a cheerful group picture of the thirteen carefree girls in a lovely river landscape with a view of the passing steamers and the vineyards. The narrator is astonished that there is “no trace of the grim incidents” that will determine the fate of the young people and their families in the smooth and bare faces, as their memories of the excursion are superimposed on the knowledge of their tragic lives. The narrator is the only survivor.

  • Thirty years later Leni and Marianne are dead. Leni's brother dies in autumn 1914, her husband Fritz, the son of a railroad worker, is arrested by the Gestapo in his illegal printing house. Leni, who distributed the leaflets and refuses to testify against her husband, is beaten and starved to death in a women's concentration camp in the second winter of the war in 1940 . Your friend on the seesaw is the pretty Marianne. Before the return trip, she meets her friend Otto Fresenius at the steamer landing stage, who is also on an excursion with his junior high school. She will become engaged to him before he fought with a student battalion in the Argonne in 1914, where he was ripped apart by a bullet. After the period of mourning, she married the later SS-Sturmbannführer Gustav Liebig, a counter-figure to Otto, who advocated legality and justice, fell into the maelstrom of fascism with him and joined the Nazi women's group . When, after Leni's arrest, the neighbors wanted to save their little daughter from the National Socialist reform home and asked for travel money to hide the child with relatives of the father in Berlin, Marianne refused to support enemies of the party and denied her loyal friend. Grotesquely, the girl may just survive the war by being admitted to the home. If Marianne had taken the girl in, she would have died with her in the air raid on the city. Her corpse is half-charred in the bombed house by the late fire brigade , found in smoking rags in the ashes of her parents.
  • The self-confident, small, snub-nosed Nora proves her affection for Miss Sichel, her favorite teacher, during the First World War, when she takes care of soldiers pulling to the front with her on the same shift at the station. Later, however, Fräulein Sichel was insulted by Nora - meanwhile head of the city's National Socialist Women's Association - as a "Jew swine", spat at and chased from a "Jew-free" park bench. She was deported to Poland with Sophie Meier.
  • Sophie Meier dies on the transport to Poland in a "packed, sealed wagon" in Miss Sichel's arms.
  • The hairdresser's daughter Lore has had one lover after another over the years, most recently a Jewish friend. When she accused “an angry Nazi lover” of racial disgrace and threatened her with a concentration camp, she committed suicide with “sleeping powder”.
  • Ida, a teacher's daughter, shares her interest in boys with her friend Lore while she is at school. After her bridegroom fell in front of Verdun , she became a deacon and then a functionary for the National Socialist nurses. In the next war, out of hatred of the enemy, she preferred her compatriots to the prisoners of war in a hospital behind the front. In that hospital in the winter of 1943 a bomb cracked Ida's head and she died with friends and foes.
  • Gerda, Miss Mees' favorite student and “born to nurse and love people”, becomes a teacher “in a sense that has almost disappeared from the world, as if she were chosen to look for children everywhere who need her”. During the Weimar Republic she married the teacher Neeb, who supervised the subprimans on the excursion and who was already keeping an eye on them after they met at the “Bund decided school reformers”. When her husband hangs the swastika flag out of the window on May 1st, against her express will for fear of his employment following the government's instructions , she turns on the gas tap out of sheer shame and suffocates.
  • Else, a round girl with a cherry-red mouth, marries the master carpenter Ebi. Her apprenticeship as an accountant at the commercial school comes in extremely handy for his business. After an English air raid, the two of them with their three children and journeymen, including their house and workshop, are in dust and tatters.
  • Katharina marries an upholsterer. After the occupation of France, he was reinforced in his belief that the German people were stronger than other peoples. He was surprised by the news that his wife, together with her family, her younger sister Toni and her daughter, her mother and aunt, was crushed by a bomb in the basement of his father's house.
  • Marie Braun also burns to death with her family in her father's wallpapering business.
  • Liese Möbius becomes a primary school teacher. Because of her unshakable loyalty to the Catholic faith, she treated the National Socialist authorities with disdain and transferred her to a school for the less gifted, which she accepted as fate. But then in the air raid shelter the “most brutal Nazi women” crowd around little Liese. In vain - none of the women survived the bombing.
  • Lotte becomes a sister in the monastery on the Rhine island of Nonnenwerth , she flees across the Dutch border, but is overtaken by the persecutors after the country has been occupied by German troops.

When Netty comes home from the excursion, she sees her mother on the veranda on the second floor: “She was standing happily and upright, destined to a busy family life, with the usual joys and burdens of everyday life, not to an agonizing, cruel end all in one remote village where she had been exiled by Hitler . Now she recognized me and waved as if I had been away ”. But before the narrator can hurry up the stairs and hug the mother, the scene dissolves and changes to the framework story in Mexico: “I wondered how I should spend the time, today and tomorrow, here and there, because now I felt one immeasurable stream of time, as invincible as the air. "

shape

The deep grief over the loss of the friends, classmates and the dear mother is presented in a factual document, which alternates with bilious-sarcastic remarks.

“I wondered how I should spend the time, today and tomorrow, here and there, for I now felt an immeasurable flow of time, as invincible as the air. We have been accustomed from an early age, instead of humbly surrendering to the time, to cope with it in some way, ”Anna Seghers concludes her lament for the dead. With “here and there” she refers to Mexico and Europe. The author tries to cope with time, which is mainly mentioned, on four levels. In 1944 in Mexico - on the fourth level - she longs to return to her German homeland. Your thoughts wander back and forth between the first to the third level. The first level is the period shortly before the First World War, the second the First World War and the third the not yet ended Second World War.

Above under "Contents" only the terrible end of women was sketched. Anna Seghers uses two tricks in the text. Firstly, she moves between time levels one to three when telling each individual fate. Second, she always contrasts the abysmal evil from time level three with the consistently happy, fun-loving life from time level one. For example, the mother stands "happy and upright"; she "laughs and waves" when Netty comes home. Anna Seghers, soon graying, looks down on her much younger mother from time level four.

reception

"... when I lay sick and unconscious ..." wrote Anna Seghers at the beginning of her story. Bodo Uhse remembers: The author was hit by a car in Mexico in 1943. Her skull was smashed in the process. The seriously injured person fought against death for weeks.

Brandes admires the “fantastic time and place shifts” as well as the simple construction and considers “The Excursion of the Dead Girls” to be “the most artistic and melancholy story” by the great author.

Sonja Hilzinger writes: "This story is considered one of the masterpieces of German-language literature."

Hilzinger gives further information:

  • Anna Seghers working group: “Anna Seghers' story The excursion of the dead girls . A surrealistic composition of dream and reality. "
  • Elisabeth Bense , Klaus Schulte: “ Trouvaille ! On a remarkable essay on Anna Seghers' excursion of the dead girls by Thomas Aron ”.
  • Anthony Greenville: “Anna Seghers Confronts the Holocaust. The Jewish Dimension to The Excursion of the Dead Girls "
  • Sonja Hilzinger: “In the field of tension between exile and homecoming. Functions of writing in the novella The Excursion of the Dead Girls "
  • Sonja Hilzinger: " The excursion of the dead girls " in "Stories of the 20th Century", Vol. 2 (1996)
  • Karl Hotz: "Anna Seghers, The Excursion of the Dead Girls " (1993)
  • Fritz Pohle: “War exile in Mexico and Mexican fabrics with Anna Seghers. From the excursion of the dead girls (1943/44) to the real blue (1967) ”.
  • Fritz Pohle: "Preparation for the next German lesson and more: The excursion of the dead girls (1943/44)"
  • Simonetta Sanna: "Landscape in Anna Seghers´ The Excursion of the Dead Girls " (1996)
  • Werner Zimmermann: "Anna Seghers: The excursion of the dead girls "

literature

Text output

First edition

  • The excursion of the dead girls in: The excursion of the dead girls and other stories (also contains: "Post to the Promised Land". "The End"). Aurora-Verlag , New York 1946. 127 pages, linen

expenditure

Audio book

  • Anna Seghers reads: “The excursion of the dead girls” (1 CD, 51 minutes). Der Audio Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 3-89813-751-1 (author reading, production: Rundfunk der DDR 1965 / DRA, Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv).

Secondary literature

  • Heinz Neugebauer: Anna Seghers. Life and work. With illustrations (research assistant: Irmgard Neugebauer, editorial deadline September 20, 1977). 238 pages. Series “Writers of the Present” (Ed. Kurt Böttcher). People and knowledge, Berlin 1980, 3rd edition 1988, ISBN 3-06-101031-9 .
  • Kurt Batt : Anna Seghers. Trial over development and works. With illustrations. 283 pages. Reclam, Leipzig 1973 (2nd edition 1980). Licensor: Röderberg, Frankfurt am Main ( Röderberg-Taschenbuch Vol. 15), ISBN 3-87682-470-2 .
  • Ute Brandes: Anna Seghers . Colloquium, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-7678-0803-X (= heads of the 20th century , volume 117).
  • Sonja Hilzinger: Anna Seghers. With 12 illustrations. Series of Literature Studies. Reclam, Stuttgart 2000, RUB 17623, ISBN 3-15-017623-9 .

Remarks

  1. ↑ Anna Seghers found out about the deportation and murder of her mother in the concentration camp in 1943 (Neugebauer, p. 109, 5th Zvu).
  2. ↑ Sonja Hilzinger (* 1955) is a private lecturer in modern German literature at the University of Mainz .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Anna Seghers dedicated the story to her mother Hedwig Reiling, who was deported to the Piaski ghetto near Lublin on March 24, 1942 at the age of 62 and killed there. Reinhard Frenzel: Hedwig Reiling . In: Frauenbüro Landeshauptstadt Mainz (Hrsg.): Frauenleben in Magenza . The portraits of Jewish women from the Mainz women's calendar and texts on women's history in Jewish Mainz. 4th and completely revised edition. Mainz 2015, OCLC 908617988 , p. 26 , col. 2 ( mainz.de [PDF; 8.8 MB ] - Editor Eva Weickart).
  2. ↑ Netty Reiling is the author's maiden name.
  3. ↑ Reference to the dating: The author was in hospital for a long time after a traffic accident in June 1943.
  4. ^ Batt, p. 156, 2nd Zvu
  5. ↑ Edition used, p. 334, middle
  6. ↑ Edition used, p. 333, 3rd Zvu
  7. ↑ Edition used, p. 349, 15. Zvo
  8. ↑ Edition used, pp. 334–335
  9. ↑ Edition used, p. 356 middle
  10. ↑ Edition used, pp. 339–340 center
  11. ↑ Edition used, p. 352, 10. Zvo
  12. ↑ Edition used, p. 342, 8. Zvo
  13. ↑ Edition used, p. 357, 10th Zvu
  14. ↑ Edition used, p. 358, 5. Zvo
  15. ↑ Edition used, p. 360, 13. Zvu
  16. ↑ Edition used, p. 362, 11. Zvu
  17. ↑ Edition used, p. 360
  18. ↑ Edition used, p. 334, 6. Zvo
  19. ↑ Batt, p. 156 and Neugebauer, p. 109, 2nd Zvu
  20. ↑ Brandes, p. 57, 1. Zvo
  21. ↑ Hilzinger, p. 120, 15. Zvu
  22. ↑ quoted in Hilzinger, p. 214, 2nd entry (in Exil 1995, p. 65–74)
  23. ↑ quoted in Hilzinger, p. 214, 2nd entry vu
  24. ↑ quoted in Hilzinger, p. 217, 3rd entry vu
  25. ↑ quoted in Hilzinger, p. 218, 6th entry vu
  26. ↑ quoted in Hilzinger, p. 219, 2nd entry
  27. ↑ quoted in Hilzinger, p. 219, 4th entry vu
  28. ↑ quoted in Hilzinger, p. 221, 3rd entry
  29. ↑ quoted in Hilzinger, p. 221, 4th entry
  30. ↑ quoted in Hilzinger, p. 222, 1st entry
  31. ↑ quoted in Hilzinger, p. 226, last entry
  32. ↑ Hilzinger, p. 200, first entry from below