ABSTRACT
If Jung's politics of montage and his literary activism had a transatlantic drift, linking Germany and the United States, Anna Seghers's world-literary practice was orientated toward the East, connecting Germany, Central and Eastern Europe, and China. According to Seghers, the encounter with members of the Hungarian diaspora in Heidelberg, among them her future husband Laszlo Radvanyi, was a major inspiration for the novel. Research has suggested that parts of the novel were based on oral testimonies by Hungarian exiles and Chinese left-wing activists whom Seghers met in Germany. By the time she began working on The Wayfarers, Seghers, who had joined the KPD in 1928, had situated her literary work in the counterpublic of internationalist world literature. Seghers's transnational modernity is characterized by strikes, political rallies, clandestine activism, political repression and imprisonment, and an imagination of working-class areas as spaces of the politicized masses and as nodal points of the transfer of political knowledge.
