Transit

by Anna Seghers

  I came back here to Marseille yesterday to bring Claudine some vegetables and fruit for the boy. I help to feed him with food from the country. Here in the city, you can’t even find an onion anymore.

  I stopped off at the Café Mont Vertoux first and listened for a while to all that old harbor gossip that no longer affected me. It all sounded very similar to what I used to hear. But then I overheard something about the Montreal—the Montreal had gone down! It seemed to me as if that boat had left ages ago, a fairy-tale ship sailing the seas forever, its voyage and shipwreck timeless. But the news of its sinking doesn’t keep masses of refugees from pleading for reservations on the next ship.

  I was soon fed up with all this talk, and so I came here to the pizzeria. I sat down with my back to the door because I no longer expect anything or anyone. Yet I jump every time the door opens and have to use all my willpower to keep from turning around to look. And each time I check the new, faint shadow cast on the white wall. After all, Marie might turn up, the way shipwrecked people unexpectedly come ashore following some miraculous rescue. Or like the shadow of a dead person who’s been ripped from the Underworld by sacrifices and fervent prayers. The partial scrap of a shadow on the wall in front of me was trying to connect with flesh and blood again. I could take this scrap of a shadow back with me and hide it in my refuge in the isolated village. There it would be aware again of all the dangers that lie in wait for the living, for those who really are still alive.

  But then a lamp may have been moved or the door closed and the shadow on the wall fades, and with it so does the illusion inside my head. I turn to look at the open fire. I never get tired of watching it. At best I could imagine waiting anxiously for Marie as I used to do at this same table. Imagine her still walking up and down the streets of the city, the squares and stairs, the hotels, cafés, and consulates looking for her beloved. Looking ceaselessly. Not only here in this city, but in all the cities of Europe that I know, even in the fabled cities of other continents that I don’t know. It’s more likely that I’d get tired of waiting than that she’d get tired of her search for a dead man who can’t be found.

  AFTERWORD*

  Perils Among False Brethren

  Three times I was beaten with rods; once I was stoned; three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I have been in the deep; in journeys often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils of my own countrymen, in perils of the Gentiles, in perils of the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren.

  —2 Corinthians 11:25–26 (as quoted in Transit)

  PERHAPS the definition of a transit visa as found in Anna Seghers’s novel would have been more appropriate as an epigraph, namely: “A transit visa...gives you permission to travel through a country with the stipulation that you don’t plan to stay.”

  I have my reasons for preferring the second epigraph. The definition of a transit visa appears to be a simple one. It becomes complicated when you realize how many countries you have to travel through, how many ports you have to touch in order to reach a country where you will be able to stay. Someone who is just a refugee fleeing to a place where his own language is spoken, who is not merely given permission to travel through, but actually granted a place to stay and permanence, is in a far better situation than the stranger, the emigrant, who doesn’t know if he will be liked in Portugal or disliked in Spain, if he will be welcome in Brazil, or under suspicion in New Zealand, or if his name is on some blacklist in the United States.

  The appalling game with the authorities might begin with a corruptible or a non-corruptible consulate official or travel bureau employee. And not just now and then, but at least every third one of these officials is “proud of being able to refuse me a transit visa. He’d tasted a bit of power with his tongue—which I got to see since he lisped—and had liked the taste of it.”

  This novel, completed in 1942, is in my opinion the most beautiful Seghers has written. Perhaps it appeared so belatedly, almost too late here [in West Germany], because in the meantime, more than twenty years after it was first published abroad, too many on both sides of the East-West border have tasted power and have liked the taste; and then they like to argue here about things not even worth discussing, such as whether books like this should even be published here. Too many try to alter destinies by finger-pointing. It is still possible, in an election, to use the word emigrant in such a way that it damages one’s opponent (as if an emigrant weren’t a refugee; for he really is one, indeed even of a higher degree).

  At any rate, one book-burning is enough for me. It was a pathetic affair that I witnessed in a Cologne school yard—embarrassed teachers, embarrassed students, and a couple of fanatics who couldn’t quite manage to get a real fire going (it’s actually very hard to burn a book). A flag was raised, a song was sung; then in embarrassment the group broke up, going their separate ways. Since that year, since 1933, embarrassment seems to characterize the way Germans live as a society; and it is part and parcel of the great German embarrassment that Anna Seghers’s books are only now beginning to appear again here in the West.

  The fact that this novel turned out to be the finest Anna Seghers wrote surely has something to do with the terrible uniqueness of the historical-political conditions she chose as her model: the situation in Marseille in 1940. The Frankreichfeldzug, or “French Campaign”—the German term makes it sound almost like a Boy Scout outing—was completed in the most painful of those twelve years (when so many had a taste of victory and found it rather to their liking!). The campaign flushed a great horde of emigrants out of Paris, out of all parts of France, out of the camps, hotels, pensions, and farms. They were all drawn to the one possible destination, Marseille:

  Phoenician chit-chat, Cretan and Greek gossip, and that of the Romans. There was never a shortage of gossips who were anxious about their berths aboard a ship and about their money, or who were fleeing from all the real and imagined horrors of the world...human hordes who had been chased from all the countries of the earth, and having at last reached the sea, boarded ships in order to discover new lands from which they would again be driven; forever running from one death toward another.

  All of them experiencing what every refugee finds bitter, and potential refugees even more so: “I thought about the many thousands of people who called this city their own and quietly lived their lives here just as I had once done in mine.”

  Seidler, the young German mechanic who tells the story, starts cheerfully, with an almost brash masculinity, hardly touching on the political situation, rather taking for granted that the German army brought in by the Nazis and bringing the Nazis with it should invade France. Seidler escapes from Paris after being left behind by his friend Paul, taking along the suitcase and manuscript of the writer Weidel, who has committed suicide in a hotel. Pretending to be Weidel, Seidler applies for the dead man’s visa, more or less pushed into this role by the consular officials rather than by any plan of his own. And so the terrible game begins: “It’s a game just like any other. It’s a gamble you take by living in this world.”

  Playing the game, he pulls along behind him like a shadow Weidel’s former wife, Marie, while also attracting her as a person. The story, composed like a musical score, turns into a game centered around Marie, who in the meantime has become the companion of another man, a doctor, but after various manipulations she devolves upon Seidler—“she probably knew what lay ahead of her. Once again, what else but love.” However, the doctor returns, and the game begins anew. Everything seems to be moving toward a happy end, with Marie and Seidler to be reunited on the departing ship. But then Seidler reneges, gives up the visa he obtained with so much effort, the ticket for the ship, and the security money. It is Weidel, the dead man, scoffed at by all and betrayed, who wins.

  The story revolves around three characters: Weidel, Seidler, and Marie. Employing realistic stylistic means, Anna Seghers succeeds, or to be exact, succeeded two decades ago, in combin
ing these incredible, almost inexplicable, unreal aspects of the situation, the abstract and crazy longing for a transit visa and the subsequent rejection of it. Out of a real historic political situation, she creates a novel that is simultaneously saga, epic, and myth—in the approaching figure of Marie, in the receding of Marie’s shadow, and in the constant presence of the dead Weidel.

  The trenchant and very realistic irony with which the minor characters are presented (“I thought how remarkably unbecoming what we call bad luck was to Achselroth,” and an old Jewish woman looks as if she had “been driven out of Vienna not by Hitler but by an edict of the Empress Maria Theresa”) does not destroy the circle of this magic. None of the minor characters, not Marie’s new partner the doctor, or Paul the betrayer, or the Jewish Foreign Legionnaire, or Seidler’s lover Nadine, or the Binnets—none of them intrudes on the enchanted Weidel-Seidler-Marie triangle.

  The absurdity of the transit situation becomes clearest in the case of the woman who has the hotel room next to Seidler’s. She feeds, cares for, and spoils two dogs because the dogs are the guarantee for her visa. They belong to citizens of a promised land that she may set foot in only because of the dogs.

  It is not for me to reproach Anna Seghers for living where she lives [East Germany]. I don’t quite see why even the coldest of all cold warriors would not want this novel to be available here [in West Germany]. Certainly it is no coincidence that our state honors refugees who speak our language yet has never established a relationship with those potential refugees who not only speak our language but also write in it. I doubt that our post-1933 literature can point to many novels that have been written with such somnambulistic sureness and are almost flawless. The story told here, the subject considered here, speaks more clearly and effectively than countless protests and resolutions against the circumstances under which an individual, who doesn’t want to emigrate but has to flee from the East to the West, must struggle to obtain—perhaps paying with his blood or even his life—something even the best-intentioned official cannot issue him: that same exit visa for which thousands longed and demeaned themselves in the Marseille of 1940.

  For anyone who would like to make writers aware of the dangerous conditions under which they live and write, I would refer them to the last danger enumerated by Saint Paul and cited by Anna Seghers: Perils among false brethren.

  —HEINRICH BÖLL

  *First published in the newsweekly Der Spiegel (June 6, 1964) and then as the afterword for the German edition of Transit (Neuwied: Luchterhand Verlag, 1985).