Transit

"The 'Montreal' is said to have sunk between Dakar and Martinique. It hit a mine. The shipping company is not providing any information." These words, spoken by the unnamed narrator at the beginning, were written by Anna Seghers as she worked on the first drafts of her later novel "Transit" while on the open sea during her several-month-long crossing from Europe to Mexico.Marseille, 1940: Fleeing the Nazis, thousands of people arrive in the southern French city, the last open port in Europe besides Lisbon. Trapped in a state of limbo, "deadly boredom," and constant fear of raids, most of them can neither move forward nor backward. A race for papers begins at the city's consulates: visas, transit permits, passes... Only when everything is complete is there any hope of a passage out of Europe by ship. In the turmoil of the escape, the first-person narrator, who has fled a German concentration camp, comes across the papers of a dead man. Seidler becomes Weidel—at least on paper. When Seidler meets Marie, who fled with a German doctor, he falls in love—without realizing that Marie is still searching for her missing husband, a certain author named Weidel... Anna Seghers' "Transit" is an improbable story. Full of chance encounters and unplanned complications. But it is precisely the improbability of the events that connects the individual fates of flight and expulsion. Anna Seghers' realistic narrative style pieces together the many mosaic pieces and shards of a biography into something that, viewed from a distance, forms a picture. Perhaps this makes a common understanding possible, at least for the moment of storytelling—and comfort in interpersonal encounters. By Lukas Nowak