Transit Read online

  ANNA SEGHERS (née Netty Reiling; 1900–1983) 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, Seghers was forced to flee again after the 1940 Nazi invasion. With the aid of Varian Fry, Seghers, her husband, and 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 Union and publishing at a steady pace. Among Seghers’s internationally regarded works are The Seventh Cross (1939; adapted for film in 1944 by MGM), one of the only World War II–era depictions of Nazi concentration camps; the novella Excursion of the Dead Girls (1945); The Dead Stay Young (1949); and the story collection Benito’s Blue (1973).

  MARGOT BETTAUER DEMBO has translated works by Judith Hermann, Robert Gernhardt, Joachim Fest, Ödön von Horváth, Feridun Zaimoglu, and Hermann Kant, among others. She was awarded the Goethe-Institut/Berlin Translator’s Prize in 1994 and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize in 2003. Dembo also worked as a translator for two feature documentary films, The Restless Conscience, which was nominated for an Academy Award, and The Burning Wall.

  PETER CONRAD was born in Australia, and since 1973 has taught English literature at Christ Church, Oxford. He has published nineteen books on a variety of subjects; among the best known are Modern Times, Modern Places; A Song of Love and Death; The Everyman History of English Literature; and studies of Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles. His most recent book is Creation: Artists, Gods and Origins. He has contributed features and reviews to many magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Observer, the New Statesman, The Guardian, and The Monthly.

  HEINRICH BÖLL (1917–1985) was one of Germany’s foremost post–World War II writers. He wrote short stories, essays, plays, and novels, the most famous of which are Billiards at Half-Past Nine, The Clown, Group Portrait with Lady, and The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum. Böll was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize in 1967 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1972.

  TRANSIT

  ANNA SEGHERS

  Translated from the German by

  MARGOT BETTAUER DEMBO

  Introduction by

  PETER CONRAD

  Afterword by

  HEINRICH BÖLL

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  This is a New York Review Book

  Published by The New York Review of Books

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1951 by Aufbau-Verlag GmbH, Berlin

  Translation copyright © 2013 by Margot Bettauer Dembo

  Introduction copyright © 2013 by Peter Conrad

  Afterword by Heinrich Böll © Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG, Cologne/Germany; courtesy René Böll

  All rights reserved.

  The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut, which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

  Cover image: Francis Picabia, Olga, 1930; © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris; photograph by Philippe Migeat; Paris CNAC/MNAM/RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Seghers, Anna, 1900–1983.

  [Transit. English]

  Transit / by Anna Seghers ; introduction by Peter Conrad ; translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo ; afterword by Heinrich Böll.

  pages cm. — (New York Review Books Classics)

  ISBN 978-1-59017-625-2 (alk. paper)

  1. World War, 1939–1945—Refugees—Fiction. 2. Marseille (France)—Fiction. I. Dembo, Margot Bettauer, translator. II. Title.

  PT2635.A27T713 2013

  833'.912—dc23

  2012044953

  eISBN 978-1-59017-640-5

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  TRANSIT

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  Afterword

  INTRODUCTION

  THE STORY told by Transit—about refugees attempting to escape from Europe as Hitler’s armies advanced—is one that Anna Seghers had lived. As a Communist, she had been arrested by the Gestapo when Hitler seized power in 1933. After her release, she migrated to Paris, and after the Germans invaded northern France she fled to Marseille—the city “where Europe ends” as the narrator of Transit dolefully notes. Along with Lisbon in neutral Portugal, Marseille was one of the few ports that offered an exit from a continent that was closing down. Here Seghers joined the crowd of harried strays she describes in her novel, scuttling from one consulate to the next in an attempt to assemble the visas and permits required for their onward journey. Not for the last time, modern life had turned into the enactment of a Kafka novel: Seghers and countless others were like Kafka’s Joseph K trying to get his credentials as a land surveyor recognized by the officials in the impenetrable castle.

  While Seghers fretted in one or another of those Marseille waiting rooms, her friend Walter Benjamin, who also abandoned Paris when the Nazis marched in, killed himself in a town on the border between France and Spain. Benjamin was hoping for a visa that would allow him to cross the Pyrenees and travel on to Lisbon, from where he hoped to sail to the United States. Threatened with deportation to France, he took morphine pills. Seghers was luckier. In March 1941 she managed to obtain the necessary permits, and secured passage on a ship bound for what was still, for terrorized Europeans, the New World. She began to write Transit soon after her arrival in Mexico, where she settled. It was first published in English and Spanish translations in 1944; it did not appear in German until 1948, three years after Seghers returned to her native land. True to the left-wing faith of her youth, she lived in East Berlin until her death in 1983.

  Sailing to Mexico, Seghers told friends that she felt “as though I had been dead for a year.” This was not quite the same as asserting that she now felt alive: she placed herself in the transitional state of Marie, the heroine of her novel, who may or may not have died when a ship like the one on which Seghers was traveling hits a mine and who is now, thanks to the narrator’s wishful imagination, “ripped from the Underworld by sacrifices and fervent prayers.” Although Seghers adopted the persona of a narrator who plots unscrupulously to get onto one of those ships, Transit takes a sadder, longer view of her own experience. It observes events from what might be the vantage point of the gods, looking down—or in Seghers’s case looking back since, when she wrote it, she was already “over there,” enjoying the resurrection her characters dream of—on the spectacle of human folly, the delusion of human hope, and the alternation of anxiety and ennui that consumes our days.

  The perspective places individual fat
es at a distance. The characters who crowd the Marseille waterfront gaze out toward a vanishing point on the horizon that is obscured by mist; Seghers seems to be quizzically peering in the opposite direction, across the ocean that divides the continent she identified with renewal from the old one which was in terminal decline. The chronology to which the story refers is not that of the newspapers: it deals in epochs, where disasters cyclically recur and nothing new ever happens. Biblical catastrophes are the stuff of daily life, and the last days always seem to be arriving. The concentration camp inmates resolve to break free “before the Last Judgment”; in Marseille a travel bureau looks like “the administrative offices for the Last Judgment.” A ship leaving for Brazil reminds the narrator of Noah’s Ark—an inevitable analogy, further elaborated in Erich Maria Remarque’s very similar novel The Night in Lisbon, where the refugees clustered on the quays in the Portuguese capital see every boat as an ark, with America as the Ararat where it will, with luck, come to rest. Completing the allegory, Remarque fills in details of the Old Testament deluge, sent to exterminate errant mankind: it was happening again on dry land as Hitler’s armies trampled Europe. The myth, as Seghers retells it in Transit, omits the olive branch: the characters spend much of the novel scrambling to qualify for berths on a ship that we already know, if we remember the opening sentence of the book, will sink.

  Seghers captures the atmosphere of Marseille with gritty exactitude: the cheerless winter sun, the trees rigid with cold, the hydrants opened in the morning to clean the streets that merely sluice dirt downhill. But her contemporary snapshots record only the surface. This city is a time tunnel, through which the wind has always been blowing, with clouds of dust and crowds of people swirling before it. The same gossip has been exchanged around the harbor—which opens onto a sea that was once considered to be the uterine center of the earth—since the time of the Romans, Greeks, or Phoenicians, while the same food has been consumed for all those centuries. Who’d have thought that pizza, a local speciality, was so antique, so venerable, not after all the invention of Dr. Oetker or Papa John? The narrator loves the cave-like pizzerias of Marseille, where the wet dough has been flattened with a bent wrist since time immemorial. (He also makes this overfamiliar dish look new, thanks to a fillip of metaphorical magic: he reminds us of the surprise we all experience when eating it for the first time. How come something that looks like “an open-face fruit pie” tastes so peppery? Shouldn’t the olives that stud it be cherries and raisins?)

  Transit frequently removes us from the present in this way and lets us drop, as if through a hole in the floor, into a remote past. An American consul, an agent of what would soon become a new global empire, slips back through a couple of millennia and suddenly resembles “a Roman official...listening to the emissaries of foreign tribes with their dark and to him ridiculous demands from gods unknown to him.” Such temporal recessions induce an abysmal dizziness. Europe simply has too much history: individuals inherit ancestral problems, which have always been and will remain insoluble. On his way south through France, the narrator jokingly calls the bureaucrats who stamp passports “dogcatchers,” and wonders why they bother, since this human flood is just the latest case of a churning of runaway multitudes that has been going on forever: “It was like trying to register every Vandal, Goth, Hun, and Langobard during the ‘Barbarian Invasion.’” And if the uniformed men who stamp the papers are dogcatchers, then the narrator and his kind are just dogs—ownerless strays and mongrels, a “wretched refuse” that will never be embraced by the welcoming Statue of Liberty in another harbor across the ocean.

  Jean Cocteau, on a brief visit to New York in 1949, sat up all night on the plane composing a sermon addressed to the liberators and (he hoped) saviors of self-destructive Europe. “Americans,” he said, “the dignity of humanity is at stake.” So it is in Transit, except that the dignity of our species may already have been forfeited—brutishly denied by the Nazis, sabotaged as well by the treachery and selfishness that are rife among the refugees. The novel’s blunt but richly allusive title suggests that these are people in transition, and not only between countries: they commute up and down on what theologians once saw as the great chain of being, some aspiring to the status of spirits, others behaving and even coming to look like beasts. Binnet’s mistress has “the head of a wild, black bird,” while another woman who has been compulsively crying is left with the puffy red face of a goblin. A suspicious landlady, perhaps “working in disguise for some secret authority as an exorcist,” has teeth that grow longer overnight, an inflatable bosom, and a body that probably ends in a fishtail.

  We are in the realm of Greek myth, liable to encounter ogres or deities. The gatekeeper at the Mexican consulate in Paris is a glowering Cyclops with one empty eye socket, and in Marseille the narrator finds that the hotel room next to his is occupied by Diana, the goddess of the hunt, who is accompanied by two howling Great Danes. Or rather—as the myth is turned upside down, with human and animal changing places—she accompanies the dogs, since their exit from France has already been arranged by their American owners, and the woman, whose crooked shoulders and garish dress hardly suit the chaste deity, is only guaranteed passage out because she is their guardian.

  The narrator’s French girlfriend Nadine comments at one point, “You foreigners are all so strange.” She means that they are aliens, not members of a common human family—existentially different like the étranger in the novel of that title by Albert Camus, which was published in 1942. For good or ill, the metaphors in Transit alienate or estrange us from the people to whom they’re attached. Does this make the fishy landlady or the weepy goblin dangerous, inimical, subhuman, like the ethnic groups the Nazis wished to exterminate, or are our own definitions at fault? Might we be in the presence of the divine, not the demonic? As H.G. Wells suggests in his descriptions of Martians in The War of the Worlds, it’s merely our anthropomorphic conceit that makes us think that creatures who don’t look like us must be monsters; Picasso’s portraits also treat the human face as something provisional, able to be rearranged at will. There’s a creepy moment in Transit when the narrator stumbles upon a party of drunken Foreign Legionnaires in “outlandish Arabic headgear.” One of them is a dwarf, and another—who doesn’t think Hitler is such a bad fellow—is so disfigured that he looks “as if neither his mouth nor his nose were in the right place, as if they were flattened over his face.” The dead writer Weidel—whose identity the narrator adopts—leaves behind him a manuscript that is, like Transit, a modern fairy tale, set in “a forest for adults.” Boys turn into bears, girls into lilies; the transformations are uncanny, but Weidel’s fictional magic works like a spell, a talisman. These, the narrator feels, are “stories that would have protected me from evil.” In fact they teach him how to practice a kind of evil, a sinister enchantment that puts a physiological curse on other people.

  Marseille is supposed to be the point of departure for heaven, that fanciful next world “over there,” the place where the old Spanish man believes he will “regain his youth or find a sort of eternal life.” In fact, the people in the crowd jostling outside one of the consulates are scrambling to board “the last ferry across the Dark River Styx.” They are debarred because they are still vestigially alive and haven’t yet suffered enough; the fate worse than death is to be sent back to that bleakly sunlit reality above ground.

  Everything and everyone in Transit is transitory. The narrator begins by shrugging that all acquaintances are “fleeting,” like people accidentally met on trains and in waiting rooms, and he adds that mental impressions also go “right through you, quickly, fleetingly.” Even thoughts are fugitives—and from whom or what are they, like those who think them, fleeing? From death, which is moving ever closer with its swastika banner (or with the skull emblems that were the insignia of the SS). The narrator fancies that “Death was also fleeing” and can only wonder “who was at his heels?” In this perpetually moribund Europe, always dying and always being re
born to sicken and die all over again, no finality—not even that supplied by an unhappy ending—can be hoped for.

  Hence the narrator’s grim admiration for two beggars he sees sleeping at a construction site: they may be the wisest characters in this populous book, because they are so inertly resigned. The tramps in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot—written in 1948–49, not long after the publication of Transit—share the vexatious vital itch of Seghers’s refugees. Stalled and impotent, they still feel compelled to pass the time with their games and whimsies. The tramps in Transit are beyond that, unconcerned about the passage of time and indifferent to history, and they are therefore at peace. Louse-ridden, scurfy-skinned, they are “unaffected by what was happening in their country—feeling as little shame as trees do, molding and decaying....They had as little thought of leaving their homeland as trees might.” These homeless men are rooted; they are fixtures, while everyone else is passing through, wind-blown.

  Transit is about society and politics, but it is also, more intriguingly, about literature, its deceptions and its bad faith. Can it, in circumstances like those Seghers describes, save lives? And if not, what good is it? The narrator is an inadvertent writer, or perhaps—because he plagiarizes an entire life—a fraudulent one. He does have a knack for it: even before he becomes a posthumous continuation of Weidel, he admits that “I’d always enjoyed unraveling tangled yarn, just as I had always enjoyed messing up neat skeins of yarn.” He is describing the process of weaving and interweaving that produces textiles as well as literary texts; writers, who are both orderly and anarchic, create messes for characters and readers in order to have the pleasure of disentangling them. The narrator’s imposture is his apprenticeship as a novelist. To create a character is to inhabit the identity of someone other than oneself; the man in Transit—unencumbered by a name of his own—enjoys a double or even treble existence, passing himself off with forged documents as a refugee called Seidler, although the authorities take him to be Weidel. But he has a sense of morality that many writers lack, and knows that what he’s doing is an ethical crime.