American Imago

The essay examines how the memory of exile is represented in the subject matter and literary technique of the writer Anna Seghers, who escaped Germany in 1933 and finally found refuge in Mexico during the Second World War. It emphasizes how the significance of transit or transition in Seghers's work resonates with the meaning of memory as studied by psychoanalysis and with the concept of analysis interminable as Freud described it in his well-known essay published the year before he too was forced into exile.