Tra Heimfahrt e Zeitreise: la temporalità nel racconto d’esilio Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen di Anna Seghers

Th is article deals with the time dimensions of the short story Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen by Anna Seghers, a masterpiece of exile literature. According to the state-of-the-art, this text is not only a mere account of the destinies of the participants to the journey, but the literary elaboration of the writer’s personal story as well, and it is characterized by a surrealistic patina. Linguistic analysis shows that this is also due to a specifi c use of the time connectives and verb tenses, in particular the so-called future past and epic preterit.