A novel of anxiety about the German occupation of France

Anna Seghers's 1951 novel, Transit, about a 27-year-old man of German birth making his way across France to Marseille as Germany occupies France and cuts off exit possibilities for thousands of refugees, becomes less of an adventure novel than it first seemed. At first, it looked as if the novel would involve daring escapes (at the outset, the narrator escapes at night from a French-run forced-labor camp) and more of a novel about staying in place. The narrator, oddly, decides he wants to stay in Marseille, a city in complete turmoil as thousands of migrants, who have crossed many borders to escape from Europe ahead of German occupation, confront their final barrier to safety in America: the blue Mediterranean and the distant horizon. Their stories are of a bureaucratic nightmare - or dark comedy - as they try to assemble the needed exit and transit visas from various consulates. The narrator, unlike most, wants a residence permit so he can stay in Marseille, perhaps on a farm. Through a complex series of misunderstandings and mishaps, the Mexican consulate believes him to be a German author (the narrator had been entrusted to some of the late author's final papers) and offer him an exit visa - which perversely gives him an extended stay in Marseille so that he can assemble the other needed permits, which he doesn't want. So we see a world in chaos: frightened families trying to leave, families broken apart by war, soldiers leaving and others repatriating to Germany, expecting (foolishly) to be welcomed. The narrator becomes involved in several minor adventures - helping a young boy suffering from asthma by finding him a competent (German) physician - and, most notably, the strange pursuit of a beautiful woman whom he sees at various places in town, always scanning a room as if searching for a missing person in the crowd. Through the narrator we hear many odd tales - a man trying to get a visa for travel to Venezuela where he has a job waiting for him as an orchestra conductor, a German Jew who was in the French Foreign Legion and obviously cannot return to Germany - and we experience almost viscerally the narrator's struggle to get by day to day in crappy housing, with very little money, and with no likelihood of getting the papers he needs either to remain in France or to move onward - a novel of anxiety.