Anna Seghers was one of Germany’s greatest writers — and 120 years since her birth, her works are still of enormous contemporary relevance. She chronicled the lives of the enslaved and oppressed, indigenous peoples, blacks and other people of color — those whom Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth.” A lifelong internationalist, the opening lines of her 1944 novel Transit, about refugees escaping European fascism, could speak just as well to the dangers encountered by migrants crossing borders today.

Born at the turn of the twentieth century, Seghers hailed from Mainz, a city whose radical past stretches back to its Jacobin Club and its declaration of the first democratic state on German soil in 1792–93. Indeed, the spirit of Jacobinism would pervade Seghers’s life. This was visible both through the influence that Enlightenment and French revolutionary ideals had on her, and the way she realized them as a lifelong socialist.