Reclaiming Heimat, Uprooting National Socialism in Anna Seghers’s “Das Ende”

Abstract

This article explores Anna Seghers’s use of nature and pastoral writing in her exile tale “Das Ende” (1945). I argue that, by writing a story in which villagers and nature work together to hunt and rid Germany’s war-torn landscape of Zillich, a former concentration camp guard, Seghers engages critically with German traditions of Heimat writing to “reclaim” the style as a productive mode to depict the monumental task of rebuilding Germany after the Second World War. Much of Anna Seghers’s postwar and exile works reflect in literature what she viewed as the responsibility of writers to contribute to the re-education and denazification of the German people during and following the war. “Das Ende” is no exception; it seeks to understand how fascism permeated the minds and hearts of ordinary Germans, and the work Germans must undertake to overcome such indoctrination.