This is probably my favourite short story of all time – for now. It was written by Seghers when she was in Mexico after fleeing Nazi Germany and Europe in 1941. From the start, the female narrator is confused and disoriented, recovering or suffering from an unspecified illness akin to the narrator of Poe’s famous ‘The Man of the Crowd’. The hot, bleached Mexican setting constructs (or makes possible) a time-slip mirage where she is transported back to the Germany of her childhood and a class trip she took along the Rhine, where she is reunited with two of her dearest school friends. As in a dream or nightmare, her vision keeps opening into different spaces, a café by the waterside, the quay where they watch a boat of boys arrive. This nostalgic drive is seductive for narrator and reader, details of hairstyles, of one classmate pouring milk, or two others dressing the chair of a favourite teacher with flowers. But the narrator’s return is weighed down with what is to come. She knows the precise futures of everyone she encounters and is compelled to record their fates. Seghers has both narrator and reader hovering between times in ways that remind me of Sebald’s temporal vertigos.
First published in German in 1946. Collected in The Dead Girls’ Class Trip: Selected Stories, NYRB Classics, 2021
A Personal Anthology 