Redeeming history in the story: Narrative strategies in the novels of Anna Seghers and Nadine Gordimer (South Africa, Germany)

Storytelling, as Walter Benjamin described it in the 1930s, is exemplified in Anna Seghers' exile novels Das siebte Kreuz and Transit, and also Nadine Gordimer's novels Burger's Daughter and A Sport of Nature. How Seghers and Gordimer responded to the events of their day and their ideas of the creative process found their way into the narratives of these novels. Benjamin's storyteller lives on in these two authors despite the fragmented experiences of modern life he saw contributing to the inability to tell stories in the first part of the twentieth century. Storytelling is the means by which Seghers and Gordimer remember the past in a concept of the future as either an escape from the chaos of the present or in order to give an alternative to the present. Both authors created narratives that bear witness to an era and thereby give hope for the future. Storytelling is, in this sense, a redemptive act. The narratives reflect this both structurally and thematically.; While Seghers advanced her ideas of writing as a response to the question of how to write anti-fascist literature in exile from Nazi Germany, Gordimer formulated her position while struggling with being a white, anti-apartheid writer in South Africa. Both authors share a view of the world that is decidedly anti-fascist, and born of a European middle-class, Jewish background. Seghers' and Gordimer's experiences of fascism differed, but their narratives exhibit similarities, grounded in storytelling. The subjectivity apparent in the narratives relies on the transformation of experience in the literary work. Seghers and Gordimer are most often termed "realists," but realism here depends on the use of experience, theirs and others', in the creation of their narratives rather a prescriptive realism such as that put forth by Georg Lukacs. The use of experience is also an important part of the storytelling process.; The storyteller functions as a part of society, relating historically relevant experiences to a community. Seghers and Gordimer have not abandoned that responsibility as writers in the twentieth century. The narratives' reality is that of the experience of the contemporary world, seen through memory.