The Excursion of the Dead Girls

I've been continuing my reading project but haven't found time to blog. Here's what I've been reading to coincide with Woman in Translation Month. This short story, published in 1946, is a largely autobiographical account of a school excursion by the Rhine prior to the First World War. The narrator has a vision of the excursion while in exile in the mountains of Mexico. She enters a ranch garden and hears her childhood name being called. As she observes the excursion, she reflects on the experiences of the teachers and pupils during the First World War and what she knows of their fate in the Second World War. Her lucid memory of this event perhaps comes from the fact that she was given that day an assignment to describe the excursion carefully.

The author, Anna Seghers (née Reiling, born 19 November 1900), grew up in the Rhineland city of Mainz. Her secondary education was interrupted by voluntary war service. On completing her schooling in 1920, she went to university in Heidelberg. There she met Hungarian writer László Radványi and they married in 1925. Both a Jew and a Communist, her safety was already in doubt when she began her career as a writer. Her first publication, Grubetsch (a Kafkaesque short story), was written in 1926 and published the following year. Her first novel, Revolt of the Fishermen of Saint Barbara, was published in 1928, and was concerned with the struggle of working people against injustice. Her first collection of short stories appeared in 1930. Having been arrested in 1933 by the Nazis, she fled to France and continued her literary and political activities there. Her 1939 novel, The Seventh Cross, is an account of an escape from a concentration camp. Published in 1942, it sold well in several languages and was adapted into a 1944 film directed by Austrian emigré Alfred Zinnemann. In 1941, she fled Nazi-occupied France with her family and settled in Mexico City where her husband taught in a university. In 1947, she returned from exile and settled in Berlin. She was a key member of East Germany's literary movement, writing numerous short stories and novels. Towards the end of her life, she served for several years as president of the Writers Association of the German Democratic Republic.

The narrator recalls the devastating impact the First World War had on the innocent girls on the school excursion and their young male friends. Ida, for example, “charming with her countless natural curls”, has to abandon her “loose way of life”:
“She never did get married... because her fiancé was killed in action at Verdun. This great sorrow drove her to a nursing career so that she could at least help the wounded.”
Similarly, "the dark blond, lanky youth of 17" Otto Fresenius and the narrator's friend Marianne did not marry:
“Otto Fresenius had already confided in his mother, with whom he shared his secrets, his attraction to Marianne. Since his  mother... was pleased about his happy choice, she said that... after a proper waiting time, nothing would prevent a marriage. They did get engaged but there never was a wedding because the groom was killed in action in 1914 in a battalion of students in the Argonnes.”
The two accounts pre-war (reminiscence) and post-war (history) become intermingled in the narrative in such a way that you imagine Otto in military uniform while behaving like an amorous boy:
“Now Otto Fresenius, whose belly would be torn apart by a bullet in the First World War, was the first to come down the gangplank and towards the restaurant, urged on by his love. Marianne... stretched out her free hand and placed it in his.”