Mail to the Promised Land

Novelist Anna Seghers (born Netty Reiling) was born in Mainz into an affluent family. She attended the University of Heidelberg, obtaining a doctorate in art history in 1924 and writing her dissertation on Rembrandt and Judaism. She began publishing stories and novels as a student, and was an outspoken social activist and anti-Fascist along with her husband Ladislaus Rádványi (1900–1978), a Hungarian Jew. In 1929, Seghers joined the German Communist Party, and became a lifelong member. In 1933, she and her husband were forced to flee to Paris and then to Mexico; she settled in East Berlin in 1947. A committed communist, she received the International Stalin Peace Prize in Moscow in 1952.