The Storykeeper: Observations on an Encounter between Walter Benjamin and Anna Seghers

Abstract

In 1937 and 1938, while living in exile in Paris, Anna Seghers and Walter Benjamin engaged in a series of conversations that receives only passing mention in letters to others. Their exchange, according to Benjamin, often concerned the “Lage des Romanciers” in a phase in which both writers were interested in the modern state of storytelling. This essay explores how a constellation of texts by both authors reflect the impact of these conversations. While Benjamin had just completed his essay Der Erzähler in 1936, his encounter with Seghers and her work may have led him to conceive of a different kind of storyteller. In his review of her book Die Rettung. Benjamin positions Seghers not so much as a storyteller but rather as a story-keeper, who creates space for voices that can otherwise scarcely be heard and, through her narrative, amplifies them. This figure of the storykeeper recurs and develops in Seghers’s subsequent work, particularly in the unpublished text Frauen und Kinder in der Emigration.