Dispatches from the “Other Germany”: Anna Seghers and the Heinrich-Heine-Klub in Mexico City

This article explores the community-building activism of the Heinrich-Heine-Klub, an organization devoted to promoting German cultural life among displaced artists and intellectuals in Mexico City in the 1940s. I consider the parallels between reflections on cultural identity in the work of Anna Seghers, a leading member of the Mexican exile community and president of the Heine-Klub, and Hannah Arendt’s notion of civic friendship in her 1960 speech Von der Menschlichkeit in finsteren Zeiten. In the 1942 essay “Volk und Schriftsteller,” Seghers argues that the process of cultural identification is based not on a connection to place or ethnicity but rather on social bonds that constantly produce and reproduce culture, wherever those bonds may form. Within her own community in Mexico, Seghers sought to put this call to action into practice; in effect, the Heinrich-Heine-Klub became an exercise in what Arendt identified as “friendship,” a relationship founded in active “dispute and discourse” rather than defined by a shared diasporic identity. To illustrate this point, I discuss a collection of essays, entitled Heines Geist in Mexico, published in 1946 as a farewell to the club just before many of its members returned to Europe. With contributions from Seghers and other club members, including Egon Erwin Kisch, Paul Merker, André Simone, and Alexander Abusch, the collection highlights the community’s shared purpose of maintaining intellectual exchange across ideological and cultural differences.