Born Anna (Netty) Reiling in Mainz in 1900 into a Jewish family, her father was a dealer in antiques and cultural artefacts.^[1] She married László Radványi, also known as Johann Lorenz Schmidt, a Hungarian Communist in 1925, thereby acquiring Hungarian citizenship.^[1]

In Cologne and Heidelberg she studied history, the history of art and Chinese. She joined the Communist Party of Germany in 1928, at a time when the Weimar Republic was moribund and soon to be replaced. Her 1932 novel, Die Gefährten was a prophetic warning of the dangers of Nazism, which led to her being arrested by the Gestapo. In 1932, she also formally left the Jewish community.^[2]

By 1934 she had emigrated, via Zurich, to Paris.^[1] After German troops invaded the French Third Republic in 1940, she fled to Marseilles and one year later to MexicoIn 1947, Seghers returned to Germany, moved to West Berlin, and became a member of the SED in the zone occupied by the Soviets and received Georg Büchner Prize in the same year. In 1950, she moved to East Berlin and became a co-founder of the Academy of the Arts of the GDR and became a member of World Peace Council. In 1951, she received the first Nationalpreis der DDR, the Stalin Peace Prize also in 1951, and an honorary doctorate by the University of Jena in 1959. Seghers was nominated for the 1967 Nobel Prize in Literature by the German Academy of Arts.[3] In 1981, she became honorary citizen of her native town Mainz.^[4][5] She died in Berlin on 1 June 1983.

Nio berättelser 1945-1951, alla på tyska.