Transit
Author: Anna Seghers
Publisher: Virago
Print Length: 288 pages
Genre: Novel, Fiction / Adventure, Historical Fiction, Realistic Fiction
Area: France
Topic: Jews, Transit, Asylum & Refugee System, Asylum & Asylum Seekers, Refugees & Forced Migration, Exile & Exodus, Existentialism, Politics & Power
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
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1
I / II / III / IV
Chapter 2
I / II / III / IV
Chapter 3
I / II / III / IV / V / VI / VII / VIII
Chapter 4
I / II / III / IV / V / VI / VII / VIII / IX / X
Chapter 5
I / II / III / IV / V / VI / VII / VIII / IX / X
Chapter 6
I / II / III / IV / V / VI / VII / VIII / IX / X
Chapter 7
I / II / III / IV / V / VI
Chapter 8
I / II / III / IV / V / VI / VII / VIII
Chapter 9
I / II / III / IV / V / VI / VII / VIII
Chapter 10
I / II / III / IV / V / VI / VII / VIII / IX / X
Anna Seghers (1900-1983) was an influential, antifascist author. She was born in Mainz, Germany, into an upper-middle-class Jewish family. She was a sickly and introverted child by her own account, but became an intellectually curious student, eventually earning a doctorate in art history at the University of Heidelberg in 1924; her first story, written under the name Antje Seghers, was published in the same year. In 1925 she married a Hungarian immigrant economist and began her writing career in earnest. By 1929 Seghers had joined the Communist Party, given birth to her first child, and received the Kleist Prize for her first novel, The Revolt of the Fishermen. Having settled in France in 1933, she was forced to flee again after the 1940 Nazi invasion. With the aid of Varian Fry, Seghers, her husband, and their two children sailed from Marseille to Mexico on a ship that included among its passengers Victor Serge, André Breton, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. After the war she moved to East Berlin, where she became an emblematic figure of East German letters, actively championing the work of younger writers from her position as president of the Writers’ Association and publishing at a steady pace. Among Seghers’s internationally regarded works are The Seventh Cross (1942) and Transit (1944), both available as NYRB Classics.
Source: https://www.nyrb.com/collections/anna-seghers
More from Anna Seghers in this library, click here.