Transit

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 Anna Seghers’s multilayered masterpiece, Transit, ends up in the dusty seaport of Marseilles. 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 with letters and the manuscript of a novel inside. As he makes his way to Marseilles to find Weidel’s wife, 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 Marseilles, 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 their transit papers, some leaving, only to disappear into internment camps. Several years before Waiting for Godot, Seghers wrote this existential, political, literary thriller that explores the significance of literature and the agonies of boredom and waiting with extraordinary compassion and insight.