In preparation for my Black Expatriate Writers in France class last spring, I read Nicolas Hewitt’s Wicked City: The Many Cultures of Marseille and came across a reference to Anna Seghers’ novel Transit. Hewitt’s book deals with Marseille’s history during the nineteenth century to the present, not spending much time on specific literary works; however, he does provide a few pages Seghers’ novel in relation to refugees escaping the Nazis in Marseille, the port on the edge of Europe. Hewitt’s discussion, along with reading Julie Orringer’s The Flight Portfolio, led me to Seghers’ novel, and after reading it, I knew I wanted to teach it at some point. That is why I’m including it in my syllabus for this fall.

This summer, as I prepare for my fall course, I decided to read Seghers’ The Seventh Cross before rereading Transit, and as I read each of these novels, I kept seeing the ways that Seghers, amidst all of the turmoil and upheaval of the Nazi regime, continually highlights the mundane nature of existence and the ways that life continues amidst so much violence. These moments remind me of the way that Helen Fehervary writes about Seghers’ importance, especially in this moment. Feherevary points out that Seghers’ anti-fascist writings “evoke the spirit of her time in ways that most histories and documentaries cannot” and that in order “to know how people seeking justice can face adversity and still retain hope should read her books.”

The Seventh Cross, essentially, focuses on George Heisler’s escape from Westhofen Concentration Camp and his journey to freedom. Heisler escaped along with six other individuals, and all of the others either died while fleeing or were recaptured. This action serves as the narrative propellent of the novel, a book that covers about seven days from the initial escape from the camp to Heisler’s final flight out of the country. Seghers’ wrote the novel in the late 1930s, before Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, and it details the ways that citizens fall in line with oppressive ideology or fight back against it, all while maintaining their everyday existence. It is this latter aspect that I kept returning to as I read The Seventh Cross, especially since the novel, following a brief scene with the commandant of Westhofen, opens with Franz Marent riding his bike to his factory job, passing family apple orchards with family members members picking apples as he pedals onward.

Almost everyone that George encounters during his escape carries on with their lives, some for cover against the Gestapo and SA, others just because they buy into the Nazi ideology, others, such as the shepherd Ernst, because they must in order to survive. However, even individuals who push back against the Nazis can get sucked into the ways that the party benefited them and those around them, Franz, who introduced George to the Communist Party and tries to help him escape, has moments when he thinks about how easy it would be to fall in line. He notably does this when thinking about Elli, his former partner who left him and ended up marrying George.

Franz wonders, for a fleeting second, “whether such simple happiness wasn’t worth much more that everything else.” He allows himself to to think about how easy it would be to “[g]ive unto Hitler what is his” and to fall in line because this would allow him and Elli to “have fun doing things together,” to be an “ordinary” couple that would be “making love and decorating the Christmas tree, the Sunday roast and the workday sandwiches, the small privileges of newlyweds, their little garden and the workers’ excursions.” He thinks about how they would have a son and have to postpone their Kraft durch Freude cruise. Amidst all of this daydreaming about how he wants his life with Elli to be like the lives of so many around him, Franz has “a strange heaviness in his chest” and he realizes it is nothing more than an illusion against reality. Franz’s daydream, for the mundane, the ordinary, the seemingly normal existence that Nazi sympathizers in the novel experience, lulls him into acquiescence until he breaks out of it.

Individuals in The Seventh Cross sit down for dinner together, work in the factories, herd sheep, pick apples, do laundry, and go about their lives, even with the constant threat of violence. These moments point out the ways that individuals, amidst everything occurring around them, continue on with their existence, making the most of it. The same happens in Transit with individuals like George Billet who comes to Marseille to escape the encroaching Nazi army but also works in a factory at night as his partner Claudine and her son stay at home. They don’t want to leave Marseille but want to stay and make a home there, so even while afraid they go about their lives.

Throughout Transit, the narrator points out the mundane aspects of his escape when the Germans catch up to him and he hides on the side of the road. He states, “The Germans were here already! They’d caught up with me. I don’t know how I’d imagined the arrival of the Germans: with thunder and earthquakes?” In Marseille, people meet in cafés for drinks and pizza, gathered around tables discussing transit visas and escape while the pizzeria owner works, pounding the dough as he always has and feeding it into the fire before it reaches the table. The narrator sees the illusiveness of normality for himself even as others go about their daily lives as he sits in a café and thinks to himself, “I felt ordinary, everyday life being lived around me, yet at the same time I also sensed that it had become unattainable for me.”

Along with the normality of life (work, sleep, eating, etc.), each novel also juxtaposes the realities of existence against the beauty of the land. This aspect, in many ways, reminds me of texts such as Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave where Northup describes the beauty of Louisiana in juxtaposition to the violence and brutality of chattel slavery. Before describing Marseille as a city where “the detritus was flowing” down the Canebière to the Mediterranean Sea, the narrator describes his entrance into the port city as calming. As well, he he describes the cosmopolitan nature of Marseille and how it city made him relax upon seeing “the blue gleam at the end of the Canebière.”

This beauty and calming fades as the novel progresses, moving from the warmth and sun of the summer and fall to the fog and dreariness of the winter. This movement, as well, corresponds with the narrator’s shifting views of what he wants to do — flee the continent or remain in Marseille — and the countless descriptions of Marseille as the edge of Europe where “the end of the Canebière marked the rim of our piece of earth, the edge of our world, which, if you wanted to see it that way, extended from the Pacific Ocean, from Vladivostok and from China, all the way here.” This edge mirrors the narrator’s existence because he feels at the edge of his life, not sure where to go or what to do, whether to stay in Marseille or leave. The juxtaposition of beauty and dreariness, along with the image of the Old Port, highlights this internal tension within the narrator throughout the novel.

There is so much more to say, but I want to leave it here for today. In the next post, I want to focus on The Seventh Cross and some of the ways that the novel highlights the ways that youth get indoctrinated with oppressive ideology, another topic that reminds me a lot of Northup. Until then, what are your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @silaslapham.