Netty Reiling, later known as Anna Seghers, was born in Mainz, Germany, into a Jewish art-dealer family.
Anna Seghers was born Netty Reiling on November 19, 1900, in the city of Mainz, Germany, the only child of Isidor Reiling, a prosperous antiques and art dealer, and his wife Hedwig. She grew up in a religiously observant, well-off Jewish middle-class household in the Rhineland, a region with a long and integrated Jewish community history.
Her upbringing exposed her early to art, history, and the cultural life of the Rhineland, which would later inform the richly textured historical and social settings of her fiction. She attended the Mainz Höhere Mädchenschule and later studied art history, sinology, and history at the universities of Cologne and Heidelberg, eventually earning a doctorate in 1924 with a dissertation on Jews and Judaism in the work of Rembrandt.
This formative period—straddling a comfortable bourgeois Jewish identity and the turbulent aftermath of the First World War and German Revolution—shaped her lifelong preoccupation with social justice, class conflict, and the fate of the persecuted, themes that would dominate her literary career under the pseudonym she adopted in the late 1920s, drawn from the Dutch painter Hercules Seghers.