About the work
Transit is a stage version of the eponymous novel (1944) by Anna Seghers, one of the most significant works of German exile literature. Seghers wrote the novel from her own experience: she herself was stranded in Marseille in 1940/41, waiting desperately to leave. The work depicts the wearing world of refugees in unoccupied France, caught between authorities, visas and ship passages.
Plot
A young German refugee who has escaped from a camp makes his way to Marseille. By chance he comes into possession of the papers of a writer named Weidel, who has taken his own life. In the overcrowded port city, where thousands of émigrés wait for visas, transit permits and berths on ships, the narrator gradually assumes Weidel's identity. He falls in love with Marie, Weidel's wife, who roams restlessly through the city's cafés waiting for her husband, believed dead. Amid bureaucratic harassment, hope and paralysis, the narrator finally decides against flight and against Marie — he stays behind, while the ship that was to carry her goes down.
Cultural significance
Transit is regarded as one of the most haunting novels about waiting, homelessness and the existential limbo of exile. Seghers's precise depiction of bureaucratic absurdity and the spiritual exhaustion of those fleeing has lost none of its topicality. Christian Petzold's much-noticed 2018 film transposed the material into a timeless present and underlined its enduring relevance. Stage versions repeatedly make the work newly tangible as a reflection on flight and identity.