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Anna Seghers (November 19, 1900, Mainz – June 1, 1983, Berlin) was a German writer. Although not very well known in the English-speaking world, she is still famous in Germany, particularly the East.

Born Netty Reiling in Mainz, 1900, she married Laszlo Radvanyi, a Hungarian Communist in 1925.

She studied in Cologne and Heidelberg history, arts history and Chinese. She joined the Communist Party of Germany in 1928, at the height of its struggle against the burgeoning National Socialist German Workers Party. Her 1932 novel, Die Gefährten was a prophetic warning of the dangers of Fascism, which got her arrested by the Gestapo. But perhaps she would have suffered at the hands of the Nazis anyway, since her family background was partly Jewish.

Tombstone of Anna Seghers in Berlin

After German troops invaded the French Third Republic in 1940, she fled to Marseilles and one year later to Mexico, where she founded the anti-fascist 'Heinrich-Heine-Klub', named after the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, and founded 'Freies Deutschland' (Free Germany), an academic journal. During this time, she wrote Das siebte Kreuz, for which she received the "Büchner-Prize" in 1947. Das siebte Kreuz was set in 1936 and described the escape of seven prisoners from a concentration camp. It was published in the United States in 1942 as The Seventh Cross, and was produced as a movie by MGM in 1944 starring Spencer Tracy. The Seventh Cross was one of the very few depictions of Nazi concentration camps, in either literature or the cinema, during World War II.

In 1947, Anna Seghers returned to Germany, moved to West Berlin, and became a member of the SED in the zone occupied by the Soviets. In 1950, she moved to East Berlin and became a co-founder of the freedom movement of the GDR. In 1951, she received the first "Nationalpreis der DDR" and the "Ehrendoktorwürde der Universität Jena" in 1959. In 1981, she became "Ehrenbürgerin" of her native town Mainz.

Anna Seghers gets a "cameo" mention in the ostalgie film, Good Bye Lenin!.

• "The Dead Stay Young"

• Die-Anna-Seghers-Home-Page (in German)