2 - Shared Time in the Comintern Era: Seghers and Brecht

Summary

Auf dem Steg, … traten die Färber zur Frühschicht an … die Kontrolle war scharf, sie wurden langsam, unter Stichproben, durchgelassen…. Janek, unter den letzten in der Reihe … wischte mit dem Ärmel die vor Aufregung rinnenden Nasenlöcher. Seine Haut juckte, eine dicke Haut aus Flugblatt; sein ganzer Körper knisterte.

[On the footbridge, … the dyers arrived for the early shift … the control was strict, they were let through slowly after random checks … Janek, one of the last ones in the row, … sniffled nervously and wiped his nose with his sleeve. His skin itched, a thick skin made of leaflets; his whole body crackled.]

—Anna Seghers, Die Gefährten (1932)

Dann seid ihr nicht mehr ihr selber … sondern … leere Blätter, auf welche die Revolution ihre Anweisung schreibt.

[You are no longer you yourselves … but … empty pages on which the revolution writes its instructions.]

—Bertolt Brecht, Die Maßnahme (1930)

THE SEGHERS PREIS, however its rationale may have shifted over the span of its existence, exists as an institutional trace of Seghers's commitment to a vision of authorship as the shared work of coevals to change the world through writing. Yet Seghers's work to support this view of the author did not begin with her plan for the stipend. The prehistory of the prize, as I argue, begins with Seghers's contemplation of authorship and coevality in her 1932 “Kleiner Bericht,” a concern that characterized her writing career. Nor did Seghers pursue her commitment to authorship and solidarity alone. The project of supporting leftsolidarian authorship that constituted her working life is not a story of a single author's idea. It was an endeavor that took place within cultural institutions that were also organized around the question of authors as participants in the international struggle to remake exploitative material relations. The Third Comintern, created as the “global party of the proletariat” and in existence from 1919 to 1943, provided early support for such organizations.