Novel
Transit
Anna Seghers · 1944
Synopsis
Having escaped from a German concentration camp, then interned in France as an enemy alien, a young man whose name we are never told flees the German advance in 1940. In Paris, he agrees to carry a letter to the writer Weidel and learns that he has taken his own life; he keeps his suitcase, which contains an unfinished novel. In Marseille, among the refugees besieging consulates and cafés, he obtains papers in Weidel's name and keeps running into a woman who is searching everywhere for her husband.
Context
The author herself lived in Marseille in 1940 and 1941, trying to secure the release of her husband, interned at Le Vernet, and to obtain visas, which she received from the Mexican consulate headed by Gilberto Bosques. She wrote the novel in Mexico in 1941 and 1942. It first appeared in English and Spanish in 1944, then in German, serialised in the Berliner Zeitung in 1947 and in book form in 1948. For his stay and his death in Paris, the character Weidel is based on the writer Ernst Weiss, which Seghers confirmed in her letters. The novel has been adapted for the screen by René Allio in 1991 and by Christian Petzold in 2018.
Who it is for
A novel of about four hundred pages in its French translation, narrated in the first person to a stranger sitting at a table in a pizzeria in Marseille.
Prizes and reception
Translated into English as early as 1944, then again in 2013 by Margot Bettauer Dembo; Heinrich Böll regarded it as the finest book by its author.