Maud Meyzaud: Anna Seghers und die Haitianische Revolution. Transatlantische Verflechtungen von jüdischer Erfahrung, Sozialismus und Négritude

 

Upon traveling to the Caribbean as a European refugee in 1941, Anna Seghers, who had been doubly persecuted as a Jew and a communist, discovers a history of violence quite different from her own persecution and disenfranchisement under National Socialism. The Caribbean reveals to her the global dimension of colonial rule and transatlantic trade, while at the same time unveiling the radical universalism of the Haitian Revolution. Seghers' Caribbean tales have repeatedly been accused of Eurocentrism. This lecture, by contrast, understands these texts of the late 1940s and early 1950s, most notably A Wedding in Haiti, primarily as a first, initially inconsequential form of decolonial literature in Germany. Namely, because Seghers' literature, as will be shown, belongs to the same project of an entangled history of Black and Jewish diaspora, settler colonialism and Nazi extermination policy, pursued during the same period by, for example, Aimé Césaire and the Négritude movement.

Moderation: Dr. Jeanette Ehrmann (Department of Political Science, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen)

Commentary: Jeannette Oholi (GCSC/Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen)