Looking back on his life in 1992, not long after the collapse of East Germany and five years before his death, the former East German writer Stephan Hermlin compared his experiences to those of Anna Seghers. Born in 1915, Hermlin shared similarities with Seghers, who was fifteen years his senior. Both grew up in affluent Jewish-German households and both joined the Communists while young, thus turning their backs on the class and the religion of their parents. Both resisted the Nazis and entered into difficult exiles. In exile, both experienced terror and traumas that they confront in their literary works—Seghers the death of her Jewish mother, and Hermlin the death of his Jewish wife. Both felt a strong and abiding connection to Germany, its landscapes, its music, and its literature. In part for that reason, both returned from exile, first to the Western Zone of Occupation, then to the fledgling East German state. Both were important writers, though Hermlin's international fame and recognition never approached that of Seghers, and both negotiated the complicated construction of Jewish-German-Communist identity in their works. Despite Stalinism and the resulting East German antisemitism, both writers became important literary arbiters in their chosen country, though both saw their own literary quality suffer under government demands for Socialist Realism. And, as is evident from the epigraph, despite their privileged status and “redecorated reality,” neither writer ever felt entirely at home in post-Holocaust (East) Germany.