Anna Seghers’ Erzählung Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen

From the perspective of textualist discourse linguistics, Anna Seghers’ narrative Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen (The Excursion of the Dead Girls) offers a multifaceted narrative structure between analepsis and prolepsis. In the analepsis, the characters are retrospectively described by the first-person narrator Netty during a class trip to the Rhine, simultaneously foreshadowing their future deadly fate in this memory space. Seghers’ exile in Mexico provides the narrative starting point. The uniqueness of the narrative and memory levels of the story is the issue of this article, with a focus on the temporal complexity of the narrative structure.

Through a complex interplay between the narrative starting point, prolepses and analepses on one hand, and differently constructed memory levels on the other, the presumed autobiographical narrative Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen emerges, where the boundary between the first-person narrator Netty Reiling and the author Anna Seghers becomes blurred. In her auctorial function, the first-person narrator Netty follows Genette’s conceptualization of temporal anachrony to create different temporal layers within the diegesis, in connection with the ›Vanitas tradition‹. Various modes of reminiscence enhance this temporal complexity.