From the first paragraph it puts you inside the mind of a man--the narrator--who is fleeing the Nazi advance into France in 1939. He gets to Marseille, where he has to decide whether he wants to try to leave on one of the last ships. Marseille is claustrophobic. It offers only boredom, muted terror, and the frenetic but likely senseless activity of convincing bureaucrats to issue visas and tickets to leave. We wait with the narrator in one dismal café or other where the mistral blows endlessly outside and you can't get a drink unless it's an "alcohol day."
Like Humphrey Bogart's character in Casablanca, the narrator is in love with a woman married to another man, but Marseille is no Hollywood movie set. Thoughts and feelings become unstable, then warp under the strain. The decision to leave Europe behind forever is not easy. A family where all except the grandmother have been granted visas refuse to leave even though the grandmother is certain to die within a few months and then all the others will all be interned. Marie, with whom the narrator has fallen in love, hesitates again and again because she refuses to accept that her husband the novelist Weidel is dead. The narrator too is confused. He says he doesn't want to leave, then puts all his energy and cunning into trying to get a transit visa.
We know little about the nameless narrator. He escaped first from a German concentration camp and then from a French work camp, but he does not seem ideological or especially political. He seems to be an ordinary person who just hates Nazis: "their murderous commands and objectionable insistence on obedience, their disgusting boasts." For this reason it's not possible to read Transit and think: "well, that wouldn't have happened to me back then" or "that can never happen to me." This is one of Seghers' major achievements.
One of the most moving moments is when the narrator reads Weidel's unpublished novel. It's the first novel the narrator has ever finished, and the beauty of the prose makes him feel that German is once more his language--the language of his childhood and youth, before the Nazis commandeered and disfigured it. This may not be what most people think of when they think of Nazi crimes, but for the narrator it is a very real, deeply personal loss. Perhaps Anna Seghers hoped her novel would reclaim and renew the German language for its first readers in the same way. Beautifully translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo, this English language version has the same simplicity and strength of feeling as Seghers' original prose.
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Top reviews from other countries
J C Greenway
Lyrical and beautiful tale of refugee life in 1940s Marseille
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 2, 2016J. Miller
Historically accurate but heavy going novel
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 28, 2013