| Abstract | In her autobiographical short story "The Excursion of the Dead Girls" (1946), Anna Segher recalls her longing to return home during her Mexican exile from (Nazi) Germany, into which her reconstruction of the Heimat consists of her recollections of a school outing undertaken shortly before the World War I that are interwoven with her knowledge about her classmates' and teachers' fates over the following 20 years. Von Ankum treats the dream structure of Segher's text as a metaphor for the opposition between the utopian projection of a socialist homeland constructed in exile and the actually existing socialism established in the Soviet Occupational Zone/GDR to which the emigres returned after 1945. She also offers a more detailed discussion on the phenomenon of marginalizing and appropriating Jewish experience in an effort to maintain the GDR as antifacist Heimat.
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