The Ever-Present Fullness of All Treasured Life

Transit by Anna Seghers

Anna Seghers (1900-1983), born Netty Reiling, was a German-Jewish writer whose education in pre-Nazi Germany included studies in Chinese language and culture; German, French, and Russian Literature, as well as sociology and history. She completed her studies at the University of Heidelberg with a dissertation, Jude und Judentum im Werke Rembrandts, in which she examined the role of Jews in Rembrandt’s work. It is believed that she chose her penname, Anna Seghers, after the Dutch painter, Hercules Seghers, a contemporary of Rembrandt.

A lifelong reader, she was especially devoted to literature, to the works of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, Kleist, Büchner, and Kafka, Racine and Balzac, and lived her life with a special affection for fairy tales and Jewish and Christian legends, which often play a part in her fiction. 

After the burning of the Reichstag in February of 1933, she—a Jew and member of the Communist Party—was arrested then released, at which point she fled to Switzerland, before continuing on to France, to Paris, where she got involved with the anti-fascist coalition, Volksfront or Popular Front. Yet soon she was forced to flee again, as Hitler’s troops invaded and occupied France, first to the south, to Marseille, “the uterine center of the earth”, from where she and her family finally managed to escape the mounting horrors of Europe aboard a ship to Mexico, a voyage which included the passengers Victor Serge, André Breton, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Such, at heart, is the story of her 1951 novel, Transit. In a description that surely captures her own perilous efforts to evade the steady advance of Hitler’s troops, she writes:

I watched them streaming into Marseille with their tattered banners representing all nations and faith, the advance guard of refugees. They had fled across all of Europe, but now, confronting the glimpses of blue water sparkling innocently between the houses, they were at their wits’ end. For the names of ships written in chalk didn’t mean that there really were ships but only a faint hope that there might be some—the names were constantly being wiped off because some strait was mined or a new coastal port had been fired on. Death was moving ever closer with his swastika banner as yet unscathed. 

Started after she found safety in Mexico, Transit takes “a sadder, longer view of her own experience,” writes Peter Conrad in his helpful introduction. “It observes events from what might be the vantage of the gods, looking down…on the spectacle of human folly, the delusion of human hope, and the alternation of anxiety and ennui that consumes our days.” Indeed, central to the overall force of the novel is the abiding impression that, for all of the apparent progress of the modern age, remarkably little has changed:

It was the age-old harbor gossip, as ancient as the Old Port itself and even older. Wonderful, an ancient harbor twaddle that’s existed as long as there’s been a Mediterranean Sea. Phoenician chit-chat, Cretan and Greek gossip, and that of the Romans. There was never a shortage of gossips who were anxious about their berths aboard a ship and about their money, or who were fleeing from all the real and imagined horrors of the world. Mothers who had lost their children, children who had lost their mothers. The remnants of crushed armies, escaped slaves human hordes who had been chased from all the countries of the earth, and having at last reached the sea, boarded ships in order to discover new lands from which they would again be driven; forever running from one death toward another.

Sengher’s recognition of this was by no means an apology for or capitulation to the apathy and fatalism of the age, let alone to Hitler and his kind. Rather (Why else would she write?), informing it all is the frank and finally hopeful recognition that, as Alan Watts puts it in his book, The Wisdom of Insecurity, “Poverty, disease, war, change, and death are nothing new. In the best of times 'security' has never been more than temporary and apparent". What matters is that we continue to live, to strive, moved—as by some mystery, some magic—by “the ever-present fullness of all treasured life”.

Peter Adam Nash