Gegen-Ermittlung. Anna Seghers’ Der Kopflohn und die Lesbarkeit des Faschismus

Der Kopflohn (1933), an early novel by Anna Seghers, has a unique status in the field of literary investigations: it gives a literary milieu study of its time, in which the police chases a fugitive in the province of Rhine-Hesse in Germany. The implicit protagonist of the novel, however, is the emerging movement of German National Socialism. The literary investigation thus proceeds as a counter-investigation: It illuminates the spectrum of social and psychological events that take shape in light of the police investigation, and thus depicts the beginnings of fascism. The literary counter-investigation is thus not driven by a single event, but by the emergence of a social disposition. The article then shows that Seghers’ artistic mode of representation is informed by both her dissertation on Rembrandt and contemporary discussions of ‘realism’; furthermore, it argues that the novel establishes ‘counter-investigation’ as a para-genre the history of which leads up to the present, as recent films like Michael Haneke’s The white Ribbon (2009) show.