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You know the fairy tale about the man who died, don’t you? He was waiting in Eternity to find out what the Lord had decided to do with him. He waited and waited, for one year, ten years, a hundred years. He begged and pleaded for a decision. Finally he couldn’t bear the waiting any longer. Then they said to him: ‘What do you think you’re waiting for? You’ve been in Hell for a long time already.’
That pretty much sums up Transit by Anna Seghers but I will babble on about it a bit more.
The year is 1940. The city, Marseille, France. It is the place all the refugees go to try and leave Europe. If you are not a resident of Marseille you are not allowed to stay. But unless you have all the proper papers you aren’t allowed to leave either. It is a bureaucratic nightmare that would suit Kafka well. In order to leave the country one practically needs reams of papers, transit visas from all the countries the ship you might end up taking could possibly stop at, a visa for the country you plan to actually go to, a visa to leave Europe, and all sorts of other papers. By the time a person gets the final visa signed off on, the first one has expired and the process must start all over again. The people who have money or know someone who knows someone are the ones most likely to get through and actually leave. But even once you have all the papers, getting a berth on a ship is darn near impossible too. The more desperate a person is to leave, the more difficult it is to fulfill all the requirements. The bureaucrats do not like desperation and fear.
Through this city of people who are perpetually in transit, we follow a man who calls himself Seidler. He is a German who has escaped from a German concentration camp only to end up in a French camp from which he also eventually escaped. Through the help of a former girlfriend he gets a refugee certificate that allows him to go to Marseille. On the way he stops in Paris where he runs into someone he knows and agrees to deliver a letter to a writer named Weidel. But when Seidler arrives at Wedidel’s flat he finds the man had committed suicide the day before. The landlady gives him Weidel’s possessions in a suitcase. These possessions include the manuscript of an unfinished novel. The letter he was to deliver is from Weidel’s wife who is in Marseille waiting for him where everything has already been arranged for his departure.
Seidler goes on to Marseille to the Mexican consulate where Weidel had a visa waiting for him. Seidler tries to give them the suitcase to give to Weidel’s wife but they won’t take it. Somehow everyone thinks that he is Weidel.
The Binnets, the family of the woman who got him the refugee certificate help him find a room. Everyone assumes he will begin the process of leaving but Seidler doesn’t want to leave. All he wants to do is stay. The Binnets have a farm outside the city and he would like nothing more than to get a job working on the farm. But this is impossible because he doesn’t have a resident permit, nor will anyone issue him one. So he starts going to the consulates, pretending to be Weidel, which he says is his pen name. A friend helps him get a certificate saying as much.
Because Seidler doesn’t want to leave he is not frustrated by all the waiting and hoops he must jump through. He is quite content until he begins seeing a woman wandering through all the cafes looking for someone. Who is she looking for? Seidler wants it to be him but it is her husband she is looking for, a man she never finds but is always certain to the last will suddenly appear.
How is it a book about waiting, a book about being in perpetual transit is not dull? I mean how much can one read about the stories of people waiting in line, about their frustrations over not having the right signature or the required number of photographs? How many cafes and cups of fake coffee? I don’t know how Seghers does it but I wasn’t bored for a second. Maybe it’s because the book has such a meditative quality to it. Maybe it is because there is something compelling in the stories of those stuck in transit. Or maybe it’s the absurdity of it all and the belief, like the man in the fairy tale, that it can’t go one forever, that eventually the waiting has to end it, that it has to end in a good way and not all have been for nothing.
Seghers wrote the novel during her own flight from Europe in 1942. Born in Mainz on Rhine in 1900, Jewish and an ardent Communist, she fled to France and lived in exile there for a number of years before it too was no longer safe. Though she wrote Transit in German it was first published in English and Spanish in 1944. It did not appear in German until 1948. Seghers was a fascinating woman whose belief in Communism brought her many troubles and disappointments. The Jewish Women Encyclopedia has a well written and detailed biography of her.
Transit was the May book in my NYRB Classics subscription. Another win for the NYRBs. Danielle, who also has a subscription, posted about the book recently too and also liked it very much.
One of the values of reviewing a book is moving a reader to read it too. With this review you have done that for me. I know it was difficult to get out of Marseille during the war, but it wasn’t all that difficult as you or Seghers suggest.
A while ago I finished a book by The Rescuer by Dara Horn. She recounts the strange life of Varian Fry who was able to provide visas and escape routes to a great many well-known individuals–Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, Arthur Koestler, Claude Levi-Strauss, Marcel Duchamp?
They are among the estimated 2,000 people that Varian Fry helped to escape from Nazi Germany and occupied France. They were largely Jewish individuals who were well-known cultural figures—artists, writers, musicians and scientists.
Fry began his work by volunteering to serve on the Emergency Rescue Committee, headquartered in Marseille that aided persons fleeing the Nazis. When he began the group had the support of the State Department, but that ended 13 months later as the Department slowly turned against it in favor of the Vichy Government that, with the State Department’s agreement, eventually arranged his arrest and expulsion from France.
Before then he had successfully procured forged identity cards and visas to America and arranged passage on ships leaving from Marseille or smuggling those in flight across the border to Spain or Portugal. When asked about his motives for his extremely risky activities, Fry responded that when he had visited Berlin in 1935, he saw Gestapo men assaulting Jews in the city’s streets, and he felt he could no longer remain indifferent.
”I remembered what I had seen in Germany. I knew what would happen to the refugees if the Gestapo got hold of them … It was my duty to help them … Friends warned me of the danger. They said I was a fool to go. I, too, could be walking into the trap. I might never come back alive.”
In her book about Fry Dara Horn is less generous. She attributes his reasons to a mental illness, characterized as a manic-depressive struggle that occupied his entire life. She writes that his son held a somewhat similar view, who is quoted as saying, “Maybe you need to be a little unhinged to do something foolhardy like that. If Prozac had existed in the 1940s, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
I regard both accounts as irrelevant to his work. What he did is far more important, indeed of historic and cultural importance, than his motives, motives that neither Fry, his son, biographer or anyone else can ever hope to fathom.
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Richard, thanks for your fascinating comment. It sounds like Fry helped a lot of people, and you are right, it doesn’t really matter what his true motives were, he saved lives and that says much about what sort of person he was. I am glad it wasn’t as hard to get out of Marseille as Seghers makes it seem. I am sure there was bureaucracy that sometimes was absurd and she likely exaggerated it even more. Still, it’s a good story that emphasizes the dislocation and uncertainty that so many must have felt at that time. If you read it, I hope you like it.
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How interesting! I’d heard of Anna Seghers but I’ve never read any of her books. I might try this one.
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Smithereens, it was an interesting book and I quite liked it. This isn’t the book she is most known for apparently but I think it covers a place and time that doesn’t get noted much in novels.
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Your review is splendid, Stefanie, and I am more likely than not to hunt this one down (although our library does not have it.) I also found Richard Katzev’s comment fabulously interesting and want to learn more about Varian Fry as well. A great “two for one” post!
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Grad, thanks! I hope you can track down a copy. It’s a perspective of the time period I didn’t know much about so it was both a good read and a bit of an education.
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This is a side of the war I had never really thought about (I think Suite Francaise is also by Irene Nemirovsky is also about getting out of Paris at the time of the invasion, but maybe slightly different in that I am not sure the characters were trying to emigrate. She captures the mood so well and despite the monotony and craziness of the sameness day in and day ot of going to the embassassies and trying to get the right papers–it almost (for me) read like a thriller! I would be curious to read more of her work–especially about her own ‘transit out’! Aren’t the NYRBs that they are sending great?
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Danielle, I agree, I’ve never thought about this aspect either. There was a sort of thriller aspect to it with Marie in search of her husband and then when people start saying they have seen him! And then wondering will someone discover that Seidler is not who he says he is. NYRBs is doing a great job. The subscription is totally worth having.
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Ooh this sounds a good one. I love books that tell a real story with hefty allegorical overtones. I will have to see if I can read this one, one of these fine days!
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I thought of Nemirovsky too – agree with Danielle that she captures that experience so brilliantly. I had not heard of Anna Seghers but will certainly look her up. I do like the sound of those NYRB – they do seem very well chosen.
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Ian, I really need to get around to reading Nemirovsky one of these days. Yes, the NYRBs folks really know how to choose books!
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Litlove, yes, Seghers likes the allegorical and mythic. Hope you can get your hands on a copy!
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