Every war creates its human collateral damage, not just among those engaged in or on the periphery of combat. People are redefined as casualties, victims, refugees and statistics. That’s easier and more palatable. Abstraction and distance—geographical, cultural, historical—makes it easier for the rest of us to get on with our lives. Even with the constant barrage of news and images of war that enter our living rooms, it’s rare that we ever really understand what it means to live in times of war....

Best novel I've read so far this year; despite the fact the last third or so was a repetition of sitting in cafes waiting over pizza and wine, queuing for documents, and floating about the streets with boredom - but I guess that's the whole point. Never as easy as to just jump aboard a ship with a golden ticket (the amount of desparate émigrés chasing passage meant tickets really where golden) when you have an endless cycle of trying to obtain an exit visa; which is of no use without a transit v...

War? It is what it is. It can't be helped or stopped. I have escaped from a French prison camp. Joining the other seeking refugees across the river we feel the Germans close behind. Paris is the first time I have felt anything. The Nazis already occupy the streets. The names are changed to German names as are the hotels and landmark buildings. The feeling of disorientation and repair is brief. Gone. Now survival. I am a survivor. Feelings cut into the keenness of awareness and reaction. As happe...

"Everyone was fleeing and everything was temporary."This was a rare instance where I came to the film first, and then realized that there was conveniently an NYRB edition of the source novel with which I could further feed my unhealthy NYRB completism. Plus, I've always wanted to read Seghers: she has a fine reputation among other German writers.It's an outstanding book. It's the kind of thing that the wan, uninteresting Kafka would've wished he could've written: the story of a nearly phantasmal...

I read this for Academic Decathlon 2016-17. It was... it was okay, i would not read it for fun. I myself thought it was kind of predictable in a lot of areas. Just glad to be done!

"It was all a puzzle to me, a fruitless and impenetrable jumble of nonsense that wasn't worth untangling." WHY????Ok good points first, there's certain Casablanca-like elements which kept me momentarily distracted. It gives an interesting viewpoint of WWII, set in defeated but unoccupied france. And given that refugees and immigration are a hot-topic these days there is some value in the beauacratic nightmare this paints.Neautral point, the writing can be a bit impressionistic at times and fe

An incredible novel, written in a surreal time, while the writer was living in exile in Mexico, Anna Seghers (having left Germany in 1933 to settle in France) was forced (with her husband and two children) to flee from Marseille in 1940, the only port in France at that time that still flew the French flag, the rest under German occupation.With the help of Varian Fry, (Surrender on Demand) an American who came to Marseille to help artists, writers, intellectuals escape Europe, they found safe pas...

The nameless narrator of Anna Seghers' Transit is on the run having escaped a work camp. He is trying to escape the war in Europe by emigrating, and the novel tells the story of mistaken identity, bureaucratic frustrations, and the multifaceted landscape of Marseilles at the beginning of the Second World War. Weidel, who our narrator is on his way to deliver a letter to, dies with coveted transit documents in a suitcase containing the manuscript of his last work. Weidel's estranged, ex-wife is i...

Loved this book so much. It's kinda a literary mystery tale, set in Marseille as WWII is driving crowds of European émigrés into the the last remaining free port. Which of course becomes a hell-hole of consulate queues, mistaken identities, imagined boats, and the endless search for that visa that will get you the fuck out of the continent. Our hero, who isn't even sure if he wants to stay or go, gets caught up in the mess after trying to deliver a manuscript to a missing author, dead by suicide...

"An existential thriller" it says on the back cover and I think that's so, although maybe more existential than thriller. Which I mean as a compliment.Our unnamed first-person protagonist has escaped from a Nazi concentration camp and is now in Marseille. There is a plot involving a letter he is to take to a man named Weidel, only to find that Weidel has committed suicide. He cloaks himself, instead, in Weidel's identity. He does what, it seems, everyone does in France, going from one café to th...

I'm honestly very surprised that so many people liked this book. I literally just read a 5-page analysis trying to make Transit seem like an incredible, tragically underrated novel and I'm still not convinced.I will admit that Transit provides an intriguing insight into the awful struggles refugees face(d), especially during WWII. This is not simply an author's interpretation of how they think refugees felt as they strove to reach a place where they could be safe and free: these are trials that

In the spring and summer of 1940, as the Nazis overwhelmed France militarily and occupied her, many tried desperately to flee through Marseilles. Streams of refugees arrived there clamoring for exit visas and transit visas and berths on the few ships leaving for the western hemisphere and safety. This novel follows 3 such refugees as they try to escape the war.This is described as an existential novel. The narrative's thick layers of ennui and spiritual disorientation make this plain. We're to s...

This was far better than I expected, a truly outstanding novel that reminded me of Joseph Heller, Louis Ferdinand Celine and the movie Casablanca. It is set in Marseille 1940/41 then part of Vichy France. Many German and French refugees flock to its port to try to get the necessary visa to escape from the Nazis. The last few months I’d been wondering where all this was going to end up – the trickles, the streams of people from the camps, the dispersed soldiers, the army mercenaries, the defilers...

3.5/5 "You know the fairy tale about the man who died, don't you? He was waiting in Eternity to find out what the Lord had decided to do with him. He waited and waited, for one year, ten years, a hundred years. He begged and pleaded for a decision. Finally he couldn't bear the waiting any longer. Then they said to him: 'What do you think you're waiting for? You've been in Hell for a long time already.' With that in mind, let's look now to that Sartre quote, "L'enfer, c'est les autres," ("Hell

I had never heard of Anna Seghers until a few days ago. Now, having read Transit, I think she is one of the five greatest 20th century authors writing in German. Transit is about refugees displaced by the Nazi invasion of France holed up in Marseilles desperately trying to collect the exit visas, transit visas, final destination visas, and shipping tickets allowing them to seek safety. The narrator is a German camp escapee who has assumed the identity of a writer who had committed suicide in Par...

I had never heard of Anna Seghers or her 1944 novel, Transit, but then last month, before the brilliant Cold War, we saw a trailer for the new movie based on Transit. That trailer included a critic quote that says, “Like Casablanca as written by Kafka,” and it had my attention. I was thrilled to learn that the movie is based on a book, and I checked it out of the library.Before talking about the book, though, I want to take a moment to revel in the copy of the book that the Dallas Public Library...

How does news of displacement of lives due to war, famine or any other calamity make us think? Everytime we see one of these headlines, we make a half-witted effort to imagine what it might feel like to be a refugee. We obviously fail in this foolish endeavor which nonetheless has a sympathetic core.Human history has no shortage of instances where people have been driven away from their home by war. Where, one might ask, are these narratives of migration?What Anna Seghers does so well in Transit...

“Transit” is the perfect title for this masterpiece of refugee fiction!There are so many layers of meaning in that short word, all symbolically integrated in the straightforward, realistic story, mirroring Anna Seghers’ own odyssey during the Second World War.The most obvious meaning, which is the main topic of the novel, refers to a document required of people stuck in Marseille and trying to leave France for America. In addition to the pain of acquiring a visa, a costly ticket (for an actually...

I finished this over a heavy weekend of reading and left the review dangling so as not to break the internet with too many book reviews all at once. Then life caught up with me and now it's been two months since I finished it. The lag is no reflection on either how really terrific this novel is or how much I enjoyed and recommend it! This is great stuff--the real drama of those displaced by war turning, ever so slowly, into a deep Kafkaesque meditation on life and our more mundane human desires

Transit is the first-person narrative of a difficult time when transit papers meant everything. The acquiring of a visa, an exit visa, danger visa, or transit visa are what keeps the characters in this novel away from a new life. After escaping from a Nazi concentration camp, our protagonist is asked to deliver papers in Paris to an author named Weidel. Once he's there, our narrator discovers that Weidel has committed suicide as well as a manuscript for a novel. It is in a large waiting room whe...