1 - Solidarian Authorship after Socialism: From the Anna Seghers Stipendium to the Anna Seghers Preis

Summary

LESS THAN A YEAR after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Guatemalan writer and literary critic Arturo Arias received a surprise in the mail: notification that he had won the Seghers Stipendium. Arias, who had just moved from Central America to San Francisco, welcomed the award and the monies that came with it, but he had no frame of reference for this sign of support for his work as an author. He did not know that he had been nominated, nor had he heard of Seghers, who founded the stipend. Further contributing to the award's inscrutability for Arias was the fact that it originated in a state, East Germany, and institution, the East German Academy of Arts, about to be dissolved.

The stipend that came Arias's way from an almost-defunct country was not an anachronistic museum piece. Instead, it can be seen as the principle of solidarian authorship made material. What Arias received in 1990 was the fellowship Seghers had willed before her death in 1983 to be funded by the net proceeds from her works. The fellowship structure reflects her understanding of cultural work as a collective project to represent shared time and to foment international solidarity, in accord with her “Kleiner Bericht.” By creating an award to annually support two artists—one from East Germany and one from a developing country—whose work demonstrated both a commitment and contribution to historical and social progress, Seghers effectively recognized, fostered, and created authorship as an international, collective practice of coevals.

Seghers willed the rights to her works to the East German Academy of Arts and charged the same institution to administer the fellowship. Drawing on instructions that Seghers outlined in her will, the Academy articulated the award's criteria as follows:

Das Anna-Seghers-Stipendium wird für künstlerische und literarische Werke, die im Sinne von Anna Seghers’ Engagement fur den historischen und gesellschaftlichen Fortschritt enstanden sind oder entstehen, an förderungsw ürdige junge Künstler aus der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik und aus Entwicklungslandern vergeben.

[The Anna Seghers Fellowship will be awarded for artistic and literary works that have been produced—or are being produced—by young artists from the German Democratic Republic and developing countries who are worthy of support, and whose works reflect Anna Seghers's commitment to historical and social progress.]