Anna Seghers’s Transit is an existential, political, literary thriller that explores the agonies of boredom, the vitality of storytelling, and the plight of the exile with extraordinary compassion and insight.
Having escaped from a Nazi concentration camp in Germany in 1937, and later a camp in Rouen, the nameless twenty-seven-year-old German narrator of Seghers’s multilayered masterpiece ends up in the dusty seaport of Marseille. Along the way he is asked to deliver a letter to a man named Weidel in Paris and discovers Weidel has committed suicide, leaving behind a suitcase containing letters and the manuscript of a novel. As he makes his way to Marseille to find Weidel’s widow, the narrator assumes the identity of a refugee named Seidler, though the authorities think he is really Weidel. There in the giant waiting room of Marseille, the narrator converses with the refugees, listening to their stories over pizza and wine, while also gradually piecing together the story of Weidel, whose manuscript has shattered the narrator’s “deathly boredom,” bringing him to a deeper awareness of the transitory world the refugees inhabit as they wait and wait for that most precious of possessions: transit papers.
Anna Seghers was an admirable woman in many ways, but above all she was a remarkable humanist: she became a model of cultural resistance and ideological struggle who cut across borders, and who, still today, thanks to her work, transcends time and lives on in our memory. Anna Seghers’ novels don’t only recount stories of terror, escape, and oppression; they are a call to compassion and solidarity.
—Fernanda Melchor
What makes Miss 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, Miss Seghers's presentation will stir the reader's imagination to its depth.
—The Saturday Review
On its own, this story is an important untold story of the refugee situation in Second World War-era Europe, but in its own grappling with its allegorical nature, Segher transforms the book into a masterpiece. Seghers balances these two impulses in telling her story with an existential, theological layer. The situation of these refugees mimics the course of the human soul.
—Joe Winkler, Vol 1.Brooklyn
This 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 novels that have been written with such somnambulistic sureness and are almost flawless.
—Heinrich Böll
Transit belongs to those books that entered my life, and to 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
Transit is Seghers' best full-length novel. And Transit may be the greatest Exilroman ever.
—Dialog International
Anna Seghers in Transit has painted a grim and crowded picture of Marseille when it was still a port of possible escape for the fugitives of all Europe . . . [Transit's] very air of confusion and blind groping is consonant with its theme . . . it is credible and arresting . . . there is an amazing variety and reality in even the least of the characters.
—Christian Science Monitor
No reader will question the author's sincerity as she strives to anatomize the refugee mind.
—The New York Times Book Review
