GSA 2025, "For a More Human World: Anna Seghers and Hannah Arendt", Arlington

Call for papers: "For a More Human World: Anna Seghers and Hannah Arendt," panel at the conference of the German Studies Association, Arlington, VA, September 25-28, 2025

Anna Seghers and Hannah Arendt were two of the most significant anti-fascist intellectuals of the twentieth century - yet they are rarely mentioned together. When they are, their work and thought are almost never compared and contrasted in thoroughgoing ways through sustained close analysis and contextualization. The aim of this panel is to begin to explore similarities but also disconnects between these two leading writers and thinkers whose political paths overlapped during the height of anti-fascist activism in the mid-to-late 1930s but diverged in the postwar period. 

Arendt's theorization of totalitarian politics remains influential and was connected to a suspicion of institutionalized political movements. Seghers, an institutionalist, pragmatist, and lifelong communist, developed in novels and stories, but also in her Publizistik, a concept of human rights that was broad-based and humanistic (like Arendt's) but which maintained connections between the specificity of working-class experience and the machinations of global geopolitics. Arendt, in an effort both similar to and different from Seghers, sought answers to the twentieth century's great questions in the cultural preconditions for anti-semitism in the nineteenth century and in the emotional layers of everyday life. 

The panel organizers welcome submissions on any topic that brings Arendt and Seghers together. Topics could include but are by no means limited to:

-the issue of race in Seghers and Arendt

-Arendt's and Seghers' approaches to migration and refugees

-the relationship between socialist politics and a politics of human rights

-biographical connections between Seghers and Arendt

-their different approaches to Judaism

-the style of their writing and thought and the relationship of style/form to political aims

-archival/primary research on their respective intellectual networks

-their at times converging, at times diverging views of real-existing socialism

-the enduring role of anti-fascist politics in the postwar period

Please submit 250-word proposals and brief biographical details by February 28, 2025 to Curtis Swope (cs131@wellesley.edu) and Therese Augst (taugst@lclark.edu). To be a panel participant, presenters must become members of the German Studies Association before March 18, 2025.

Contact Information

Curtis Swope, Wellesley College

Contact Email

cs131@wellesley.edu