How do we cope with the bad news?
Unless you are at the center of a very unfortunate Venn diagram, then a significant portion of the year’s fusillade of administrative destruction and cruelty-as-policy has more than likely sailed past you. When the ill intent is aimed this broadly, there are bound to have been more misses than hits. It is easy to see that things are going to get broadly worse and difficult to imagine exactly how or in what order. Harder still to imagine exactly how things can possibly improve from here, and when that might start happening, especially when most of the people who might begin to do something about it in the short term are proving to be such rank cowards. What this transitional moment calls for then is endurance, and the first thing we must learn to endure is the bad news.
The narrator of Transit, first published in English in 1944, derives a thoroughly modern coping mechanism for the torrent of ill tidings he faces: eating pizza and drinking rosé while looking out over the Mediterranean. If it’s a rug pull for the modern reader, seeing those words paired in the first paragraph of a novel set in 1940, then the impact with the floor comes a few sentences later, when this Northern European feels he has to explain what a pizza is. “It’s round and colorful like an open-face fruit pie. But bite into it and you get a mouthful of pepper…You get used to it.”
Transit takes place in a time of upheaval between worlds, a Europe that’s being swept up by the Nazis on the one hand, and the New World many of its characters hope to escape to—the way Seghers herself did in 1941, a communist of Jewish descent forced to flee her native Germany—on the other. Balanced between these worlds, the neck of the hourglass, is the novel’s Marseille, a port town full of people looking for the proper permits needed to escape the Continent. Transit is a novel of, in its own words, “paper-jungle adventures and mistaken identity woes,” one that deserves a place in the canon of World War II bottle episodes alongside Casablanca, with which it shares dramatic beats, and The Plague, with which it shares thematic ones. The novel captures the peculiar endurance required by modern times, the way we psychologically trick ourselves into going on in the face of our worry and our despair. It is descriptive rather than prescriptive, a novel about living through the surges and lulls of encroaching fascism. If you’re looking for a novel of resistance, Seghers has one of those too: The Seventh Cross is a story of the chain of small defiances as an escaped German communist is aided and occasionally betrayed by a dispersed network of friends and sympathizers on his way out of the country. Transit, rather, is a book about patience, its running out and its unexpected renewals. “You get used to it” could be its tagline.
The novel’s unnamed narrator is a German who has already escaped Nazi custody once, swimming across the Rhine with a group of fellow prisoners who will continue to pop up throughout his story, aiding him and asking for aid in turn. For him, the invasion of France recounted in the opening pages means “The end of the world was at hand—tomorrow, tonight, any moment. Because that’s what we all thought the arrival of the Germans would mean.”
But even for someone in his situation, whose countrymen and former captors are invading the country in which he has taken refuge, this level of catastrophization proves difficult to sustain. In Paris, a friend asks him to deliver a letter to a writer named Weidel and he mocks the man’s caution: “He firmly believed that the Gestapo had nothing better to do than to wait for him in front of Weidel’s hotel.” In this case, the narrator is correct. He makes it there without trouble, only to find that Weidel’s nerve has failed him: he committed suicide rather than face the invasion. The narrator takes the dead man’s papers and the manuscript of his latest novel and heads for Marseille and the possibility of escape.
There, men, women, and families hack through the various levels of diplomatic officialdom in search of a complete set of permits and passes, with the correct stamps and signatures and a series of dates that all align. It’s a procedural combination lock, a bureaucratic cipher where the rules shift as quickly and as inscrutably as the German Enigma code, one that puts those attempting to crack it in impossible situations. All to get on a ship that stands a not-insignificant chance of being sunk by a mine or a U-boat once it leaves port.
The Nazis loom, not yet present in the daily life of the city, but far too close to forget. (None of these characters, refreshingly, attempt to deny the threat is real.) The ships may stop coming and going at any day, trapping everyone there. But the biggest threat to the refugees’ well being are the countless small defeats the process inflicts upon them each and every day, a deluge of absurdist bad news, lives upended by accidents of timing and bureaucracy. A Polish refugee’s cards become invalid because his hometown is now controlled by Lithuania and so he needs their identification. A family has to decide whether to leave their aged matriarch who didn’t get a visa behind or to start the process all over again after her death. An opera conductor dies after being sent to the back of the line because he was missing a single item in his packet. There is a government of malice out to get them, but the more immediate threat here is a government of indifference.
And yet the narrator finds that the bureaucratic hell of his “fellow transitaires” is his tolerable limbo. Weidel’s papers give him a cheat code through this process, but he’s hesitant to use it. Surrounded by people who desire nothing more than to keep moving, he makes inertia his form of resistance, perhaps as a means to protect himself from these small disappointments, perhaps because he’s finally found a place where he can stop running, most likely a little bit of both.
It’s tough for a modern reader to blame him when he describes how he gets along. He’s got pizza; he’s got rosé. He takes up with a beautiful local shopgirl, befriends a couple and their young son, begins to recognize the people in lines at consulates and occupying tables in cafes. He even makes up his versions of their motives and woes. He deflects and distracts and projects. How very modern of him.
This is the easiest way out of the deluge of bad news we’re currently experiencing. Tune out, drop off, put your head in the sand. You know people who are doing this, whether it’s conscious or unconscious on their parts. Maybe you’re infuriated by them or envious of them or a little bit of both. Is it cowardly or is it the only sane way to cope? What would you rather think about, Nazis or pizza?
In this limbo, the narrator’s sensitivity to the threat he’s left behind dulls further. After a car marked with swastikas is spotted racing through the streets of Marseille, he laughs at the reaction it elicits in his little community. “The people in the cafe were acting as if the devil himself had come rattling down the avenue bent on corralling his lost flock inside a barbed wire enclosure.”He convinces himself it’s a one-off, but there’s no way of knowing whether the car is a fluke or a vanguard. The information ecosystem in Marseille is polluted, awash with rumors and hearsay. The novel’s first two words are “They’re saying.”
Our modern information environment is also polluted, but sorting truth from chaff is only one difficulty of it. The balance between inattention and immersion has never been harder to find. It would be nice if more people could place what was happening in a context of history and law and a general worldview motivated by kindness rather than greed. But that is not a problem that can be solved by having another group track every single bulletin of inhumanity and incompetence that emerges. One group’s oversaturation in the bad news isn’t going to lead to it seeping further into the consciousness of the other. The characters of Transit don’t know enough and so they worry because the bad news might come at any moment. We might know too much (except in the places where we don’t know enough), and so we worry because that doesn’t seem to help. We can feel for ourselves, when we spend so much time waiting for bad news, it sometimes feels like it can’t arrive soon enough. We track the incremental progress of it, through the anticlimax of hearing it first via leaks and rumors, then having it confirmed days or weeks later, then waiting again for someone to feel the consequences in its aftermath. It warps our sense of time and makes us feel like we’re living inside of a dolly zoom. Or maybe that’s just the dread that’s become omnipresent, the feeling that someone has just yelled “Shark!” on the beach, day after day. Is the narrator’s refusal to worry cowardice or common sense? And does that answer change as we learn what he does next?
It turns out dropping out doesn’t suit him. He comes to chafe at his indecision. His stasis isolates him. He remains at one remove from the locals and at another from those who would give everything for a berth on one of the ships, vacillating on whether to use Weidel’s papers to flee or to stay here with his wine and pizza. There is a tension in Marseille, which we know well today, between different senses of urgency, but his doesn’t align with anyone’s. He vents his apprehension, alternating between spells of melancholy and fits of energy, hopelessness and an urge to find some way to help, even when that help feels so paltry in the present context. Did he intend for his sense of respite to be temporary? Given what the reader has of his inner life, it’s doubtful. Out of context, surrender and rest can look the same. If you spend enough time online—the endless waiting room of real life—you’ve seen it before, when someone at the height of their vigilance tries to take someone else to task for relaxing, for daring to think about something other than the bad news and how to make it stop.
What gets the narrator moving again is finding someone as caught in the present as he is. He latches onto Marie before speaking to her, when she first first appears in his life as a kind of Grecian shade, doomed by the gods to flit in and out of the cafes and bars in search of someone who’s never present. In her—or in his imagined idea of her, as he sees her half a dozen or more times before actually making her acquaintance—he sees someone whose focus is similarly caught by this transitory space, whose purpose can be found here and not across the ocean.
He eventually ingratiates himself into her life and that of her traveling companion, a doctor whose urgency surpasses hers, who wants to escape and go on helping people an ocean away. She clings to the hope that she’ll find the husband she left behind in Paris here. Everyone has to pass through the neck of the glass, and she has it on good authority that he’s been spotted in town, getting appointments at the consulates, preparing his own escape.
That’s because, in an otherwise unsensational novel’s one big, tune-in-next-week twist, her husband is Weidel. Was Weidel, whom she believes to still be alive and whom she can’t stop searching for, though whether she’s looking for reunion or absolution is never made clear. The narrator is loath to tell her that these rumors of her husband concern him. The lie of his identity is like a circle where the two ends don’t touch: A whole chain of officials and smugglers and cafe owners each know part of the secret but not enough to pull it together. Counting the doctor, it’s a four-person relationship collapsed into three people, and the tension of this complex geometry pushes the narrator out of his stasis. He presents himself to her and her doctor companion as a kind of fixer, the Rick Blaine who can get her the paperwork she needs, in part because the people who supply that paperwork already believe he is her husband. He has hopes that by ingratiating himself with them he will come to win her affections, that he may even travel with them when they finally do escape and eventually win her away from the doctor. The disingenuity of his one-sided courtship is disquieting today, but it gives him a personal mission, a small-scale problem to solve, an outlet for his excessive energy. He’s not radicalized; he’s nudged. He can’t fight the Nazis himself or restore his homeland, but he is in a unique position to help these people, and this finally gives him motivation again.
It also gives him the capacity for fear. The rumors were one thing, but after he himself overhears officials speaking German in a cafe, he finds that he’s not as immune as he thought. “I was wrong to make light of the terror people felt as the swastika cars roared by—a terror so great they were ready to walk into the sea.” These are the apexes and nadirs of a thoroughly modern-feeling churn between panic and resilience, or perhaps between panic and denial. Seghers doesn’t speedrun this; she is an expert at showing how fickle empathy can be, how difficult we can find it to share in someone’s worry, how sometimes we have to see the uniforms ourselves before we believe that the threat is here. Despite his firsthand experience with the Nazis—”I don’t know how I had imagined the arrival of the Germans: With thunder and earthquakes?” he says at one point early on—the news of the swastika car catches him at a time when he feels impervious to the risk. Imminent is relative, and its relativity can be as chaotic as the weather, governed by a million variables within ourselves that we can’t hope to track.
This more than anything makes Transit a novel for our times, where every new political or economic or social development gets tossed into our own personal moil of how we remember what we read earlier that week and whether we slept enough last night and how much we’ve eaten that day and how bad our headache might be at any given moment.
The type of patience taught by Transit doesn’t have to last until all this is over. It just has to last until we’re feeling a little bit stronger, to allow us to regroup for the next hard time. The moments when we are feeling strong are a time for action and the moments when we are despairing are a time for endurance, but the moments in between are for patience, for warding off the despondency and for building our strength. The bad news will continue to come; we have to find ways to carve out spaces between it: a short-term motive, a person to help, a pizza with a view.
Eric Betts
Eric Betts is a writer in Austin, Texas.