The dead stay young (novel)
The dead remain young is a social novel by Anna Seghers , which was first published in 1949 by Aufbau-Verlag Berlin. Anna Seghers began the novel during her exile in Mexico and completed it on her return to Germany.
The novel brings together the life stories of different people in the period between 1918 and 1945. All of the characters in the novel are connected in one way or another to the murder of a young communist, and in this way a picture of the times emerges that both the history of the Perpetrators and their relatives as well as those of the relatives of the victim.
content
The young communist Erwin is arrested after street fighting in the course of the November Revolution and shot in a forest by Reichswehr officers who are supposed to bring him to Berlin for interrogation. His girlfriend Marie waits in vain for him. Since she is pregnant by Erwin, she later marries the worker Geschke, a man she does not love but with whom she can live. Geschke knows that the child Hans she is giving birth is not his, but accepts it and raises it. Martin, Erwin's friend, later gets to know Hans and befriends him, without knowing that Hans is Erwin's son. He gets to know him because Marie recognized Martin as a friend of Erwin in a bar and asked Hans to find out his address.
In addition, the story of the officers and helpers in the murder of Erwin is told. Captain von Klemm, an officer and the son of an industrialist, gave the order for the murder. He later becomes his victim when he dismisses his chauffeur Becker, who was loyal to him, because of a woman. Disappointed with the dismissal, Becker's devotion turns into suicidal hatred. He steers the car with him and Klemm into the Rhine. Lieutenant von Wenzlow, Klemm's brother-in-law, who shot Erwin on orders from Klemm, is making a career in the Reichswehr. Lieutenant Lieven, a Baltic emigrant, worked in various professions before becoming an SS officer. The soldier Wilhelm Nadler, a small farmer from Mecklenburg, is disoriented after the war and joins the National Socialists . The others involved in the murder are also killed: Nadler invades France as a soldier in 1940 and is shot there by a partisan. Lieven was shot dead by partisans in Lithuania in 1944. Colonel von Wenzlow, trapped in a cauldron in Poland towards the end of the war, shoots himself after he handed over Hans, who as a front soldier called for desertion , to the court martial and the execution and recognized him as his former victim, Erwin.
The novel ends with a scene in which Emmi, Hans' lover and pregnant by him, experiences a bomb attack on Berlin together with his mother Marie. Both women lie opposite each other, the unborn child in Emmi's stomach between them.
Subject
The novel tries to give an insight into how aristocratic , upper -class , proletarian , peasant and bourgeois classes, often only indirectly intertwined in the assassination of Erwin, try to solve their private, social and financial problems. The development towards National Socialism is thus thematized on a broad social basis.
filming
In 1968 the novel was shot under the same title as a 112-minute DEFA television film (director: Joachim Kunert ; leading actors: Barbara Dittus as Marie, Günter Wolf as Geschke, Klaus-Peter Pleßow as Hans, Klaus Piontek as Martin, Harry Pietzsch as Brauns). However, essential passages of the novel have been shortened or deleted.
output
- Anna Seghers: The dead stay young. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-351-02090-2 . (Seghers tape 1–4)