Transit

ANNA SEGHERS (1900-1983) was born Netty Reiling in Mainz, Germany, into a Jewish family. In 1924 she received a doctorate in Art History from the University of Heidelberg, and in the same year her first story, written under the name Antje Seghers, was published. During this time, she came into contact with many left-wing intellectuals, including her husband, a Hungarian economist, and began writing in earnest. By the end of 1928, Anna Seghers had joined the Communist Party, given birth to two children and was awarded the Kleist Prize for her first novel, The Revolt of the Fishermen of St Barbara.
As Jew, a Communist and a revolutionary writer, she was blacklisted in Nazi Germany and left for France in 1933 with her family. After the Nazi invasion in 1940, she was forced to flee again and, with the aid of Varian Fry, she and her family sailed from Marseilles to Mexico on a ship that included Victor Serge, André Breton and Claude Lévi-Strauss among its passengers.
Seghers gained international recognition with The Seventh Cross (1942), which became a bestseller. It was the basis for the 1944 MGM film starring Spencer Tracy and was one of the only depictions of Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War in either literature or film. It has been translated into more than thirty languages.
After the war Seghers moved to East Berlin, where she became a prominent figure of East German letters, actively championing the work of younger writers from her position as president of the Writers Union. Among Seghers' internationally acclaimed works are The Seventh Cross; Transit (1944); Excursion of the Dead Girls (1945); The Dead Stay Young (1949); and the story collection Benito's Blue (1973).

INTRODUCED BY STUART EVERS: 'A genuine, fully fledged masterpiece of the twentieth century; one that remains just as terrifyingly relevant and truthful in the twenty-first'

An existential, political, literary thriller first published in 1944, Transit explores the plight of the refugee with extraordinary compassion and insight.

Having escaped from a Nazi concentration camp in Germany and a work camp in Rouen, the nameless narrator finds himself in the dusty seaport of Marseille. Along the way he was asked to deliver a letter to Weidel, a writer in Paris whom he discovered had killed himself as the Nazis entered the city. Now he is in search of the dead man's wife. He carries Weidel's suitcase, which contains an unfinished novel - and a letter securing Weidel a visa to escape France.

Assuming the name Seidler - though the authorities think he is in fact Weidel - he goes from cafe to cafe looking for Marie, who is in turn anxiously searching for her husband. As Seidler converses with refugees over pizza and wine, their stories gradually break down his ennui, bringing him a deeper awareness of the transitory world they inhabit as they wait and wait for that most precious of possessions: transit papers.

'This novel, completed in 1942, is in my opinion the most beautiful Seghers has written . . . almost flawless' - Heinrich Boll

INTRODUCED BY STUART EVERS

'They kept streaming into the only port over which the French flag still waved. The masses wanting to leave the continent each week would have manned a giant flotilla. Yet not even one sad little ship was sailing on a weekly basis anymore.'

Having escaped from a Nazi concentration camp in Germany and a work camp in Rouen, the nameless narrator finds himself in the dusty seaport of Marseille. Along the way he was asked to deliver a letter to Weidel, a writer in Paris whom he discovered had killed himself as the Nazis entered the city. Now he is in search of the dead man's wife. He carries Weidel's suitcase, which contains an unfinished novel - and a letter securing Weidel a visa to escape France.

Assuming the name Seidler - though the authorities think he is in fact Weidel - he goes from cafe to cafe looking for Marie, who is in turn anxiously searching for her husband. As Seidler converses with refugees over pizza and wine, their stories gradually break down his ennui, bringing him a deeper awareness of the transitory world they inhabit as they wait and wait for that most precious of possessions: transit papers.

An existential, political and literary thriller first published in 1944, Transit is a multi-layered wartime masterpiece that explores the plight of the refugee with extraordinary compassion and insight.


'Transit belongs to those books that entered my life, and which I continue to engage with in my writing, so much that I have to pick it up every couple years to see what has happened between me and it' Christa Wolf

Described as Casablanca as written by Kafka, Transit is an existential literary thriller that explores the plight of the exile with compassion and insight. Written in 1942, when thousands of refugees were fleeing through Marseille, it couldn't be more resonant today.In political, cultural and artistic terms, Transit offers a vital reading experience: one that is more than just a keen-eyed depiction of a dark and desperate time, but a radical, constantly evolving narrative that delves to the heart of what it is to be human in an inhuman society . . . a genuine, fully fledged masterpieceTransit belongs to those books that entered my life, and which I continue to engage with in my writing, so much so that I have to pick it up every couple of years to see what has happened between me and itThis novel, completed in 1942, is in my opinion the most beautiful Seghers has written . . . I doubt that our post-1933 literature can point to many books that have been written with such somnambulistic sureness and are almost flawlessNo reader will question the author's sincerity as she strives to anatomize the refugee mindOne the most respected and important German authors of the 20th century . . . an important untold story of the refugee situation in Second World War-era Europe . . . A masterpieceWhat makes Seghers's story so convincing is the human authenticity of her characters, and the masterly panorama of Vichy Marseille, that 'tiny spigot through which the world flood of Europe's fleeing thousands sought to pour.' Often as that heart-choking picture has been drawn before, both in factual reports and fiction, Seghers's presentation will stir the reader's imagination to its depthTransit is an eerily poignant read some eighty years after it was first published . . . It is a thriller, yes, but it is a strange one. It might also be called a tragicomedy. Its brilliance has to with this unpindownable-ness. It has to do with the contrast between the genre elements of the novel and the stark, autobiographical realism grounding the narrative. With the way that Seghers artfully renders her characters - comically, tenderly, at times unsympathetically. In big and small ways, the novel resonates