For most readers today, Mexico in the work of Anna Seghers is probably not more than a mere backdrop—if even that. Her bestknown novel, Das siebte Kreuz (The Seventh Cross, 1942), is set in Nazi Germany and there is no reference to Mexico; when Mexico is mentioned in the novel Transit (1944), it only figures as a mysterious place of refuge never to be reached by the protagonist (21), and in “Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen” (The Excursion of the Dead Girls, 1946), a stereotyped Mexican landscape merely serves as an alien topography for the narrative frame of the storyteller's remembrance of life and death in Germany. Therefore, a reader much ask: Why did Seghers invoke Mexico, an unknown and exotic place to most of her readers, after her return to Germany? How is Mexico represented in these texts and what are the underlying implications of the image of Mexico?

Letters written between early 1940 and 1947 reveal that Anna Seghers's relationship to Mexico developed in several stages. From a largely unknown entity characterized by ignorance and stereotypes before her arrival in the country, to an object of curiosity and discovery during her exile years there, Mexico became a place Seghers wanted to leave as soon as possible in order to contribute to the building of a “better Germany,” once World War II had come to an end.