Waiting Is the Hardest Part

Waiting Is the Hardest Part

A Nazi-era novel about the uncertainties of wartime limbo, where a slip of paper meant the difference between life and death.

By MICHAEL WEISS

Long journeys and the perils of war have been perennial themes in Western literature since Homer, whose Odysseus survived both, along with the attendant hassles of unpleasant travel companions and tetchy monsters. Anna Seghers's "Transit" channels Greek mythology, in part by offering metaphorical descriptions of refugees or diplomatic officials as Cyclopses, but her 1944 novel isn't about a long-deferred homecoming or even an expatriation. It's about waiting, which, as they say, is the hardest part.

Our protagonist is an unnamed 27-year-old German caught in France just as the Wehrmacht is marching in. He has been an inmate of both a German concentration camp (for crossing the Nazis) and a French labor camp (because he was German). On a brief visit to occupied Paris, he accidentally acquires the manuscript of an allegorical fairy tale written by a well-known Communist writer named Weidel. The writer has committed suicide, but not before travel to Mexico has been prearranged for him by some well-connected Reds. The narrator packs the manuscript away and heads for unoccupied Marseilles. The seaside city in the early 1940s was a frenzied departure point for Europe's castaways, all hoping to book passage to Mexico, Cuba and the U.S. The only catch was that they had to have all their paperwork in order—no easy task at a time when nation-states were changing hands between totalitarian powers and when one's country of birth may no longer have technically existed.

Not that our man minds terribly the bureaucratic purgatory. He claims to be the only refugee in Marseilles who is happy to remain indefinitely. He has plans to work on a peach farm in southern France, but they are at best tentative. He is also sanguine about his chances for survival even amid the "whole dreadful swastika episode": "I saw the cockiest of empires collapse and the young and the bold take heart; I saw the masters of the world rise up and come crashing down. I alone had immeasurably long to live."

What interrupts this complacency is Marie, an ingénue who flits in and out of the cafes he inhabits. She is the escort of a doctor who intends to heal the sick in Oaxaca, Mexico. Both seek the narrator's help in arranging their departures, and interest in Marie rouses the narrator to be more selective in his assistance, trying—but ultimately failing—to see

identity is that of a man called "Seidler," but he is mistaken for the famous writer Weidel. At first this proves beneficial, easing his acquisition of permits. Then two problems emerge. The first is that Weidel has written an anti-Francoist novella and is thus a wanted man in Spain, through which one must pass to get to Portugal and the U.S. The second is that Marie had been Weidel's wife. So whenever Seidler turns up carrying the famous writer's documents, "Weidel" is suddenly spotted alive and well in Marseilles, giving his widow false hope and further complicating Seidler's romantic schemes. Even when he tells her the truth, she doesn't believe him.

Marie's naiveté tends toward the excessive, even for an enchantress akin to Ingrid Bergman's Ilsa in "Casablanca." "Will we see each other again over there?" she asks Seidler late in the novel, as he vies to be the third man in her life. "And if and when we do meet again there—will we be so changed that it won't be like a reunion, but more like what you always wish for in vain on this earth, a new beginning?" The very first line of "Transit" informs us as to Marie's fate: Her ship is rumored to have gone down between Dakar and Martinique.

Seghers herself was well-acquainted with the cruel uncertainties of limbo, where a chance acquaintance or slip of paper meant the difference between life and death. Born Netty Reiling to a Jewish family in Mainz, Germany, she joined the Communist Party in 1928. After Hitler's rise, she was briefly arrested by the Gestapo. Anticipating the inevitable fate for a Marxist Jew, she left, first for Switzerland, then Paris, where she remained until Germany invaded northern France; then she fled to Marseilles, where she gained Mexican asylum in 1941.

She is best remembered for having written "The Seventh Cross" (1942), one of the first novels to examine life in a Nazi concentration camp (it was later turned into a film starring Spencer Tracy, whose character's Communist affiliation was quietly excised from the celluloid). In 1947, Seghers returned to Germany and chose East Berlin when the country was partitioned in 1949. She was awarded the International Stalin Peace Prize in Moscow in 1952, and her death three decades later was announced "with deep regret" by the East German Communist Party.

"Transit" has its literary shortcomings: Seghers's prose (in the new translation of Margot Bettauer Dembo) is often bloodless, and a narrative that sets out to capture the tedium of refugee life can be, well, tedious. "Should I sit in the chair you're sitting in now, facing the harbor," our narrator asks, "or in the chair I'm in, facing the open fire? Each had its advantages." Not really.

Even so, the novel is a well-preserved capsule from a portentous moment and a worthy inclusion in the New York Review series of classics. One of Seghers's fellow passengers out of Europe was Victor Serge, the anti-Stalinist writer who described Marseilles as a "Racket-Red" city full of enough hounded intellectuals, socialists, poets, painters, writers and scientists to start a new country. Weidel—Seghers's unseen but much-discussed hero—is meant to be one of them. They had all become orphans of history, having lost control of their destinies and been forced to observe the chaotic tableau around them. But then isn't that exactly what it means to be a refugee?

Mr. Weiss is editor in chief of the Interpreter, a new website published by the Institute of Modern Russia that translates Russian news and commentary into English.

A version of this article appeared August 1, 2013, on page A11 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Waiting Is the Hardest Part.

The book is called Transit by Anna Seghers