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Whose voice is it that speaks in this novella? Questions about the narrator, and about identity and difference between the narrator and the author, strike at the heart not only of Anna Seghers's artistic self-understanding but also her worldview.
The point of departure of “The Excursion of the Dead Girls” is unmistakably autobiographical. The story takes place in Mexico, the site of Seghers's exile, and on the Rhine, the site of her childhood. The narrative alludes to Seghers's injury and illness that preceded the writing of the novella as well as to her mother's death in a concentration camp. But the actual proof that Anna Seghers and the storyteller are identical is in the interior plot, the school outing where the narrator is called “Netty.” (Seghers's girlhood name was Netty Reiling.) The literary scholar Hans Mayer, however, calculated that Netty in the narrative must be three or four years older than the real Netty/Anna, thus concluding that what we have here is the epic prose of belles-lettres.1 The autobiographical moment is objectified in the process of literary creation. The difficulty of speaking in the first person results not from the author's personal hesitation, but from the necessity of seeing her own existence in an historical light.
Who is speaking here? Is it the voice of a narrator or of Anna Seghers herself? To further complicate matters, the narrating voice seems to be divided into two subjects: the middle-aged narrator in Mexico after a severe illness, and the narrator as a child, as young Netty who describes a school outing before the First World War. This seems plausible. But then we find