What does exile look like? What does geographic displacement do to identity, and to the psyche? These were dilemmas addressed in much midcentury fiction, found in the writings of William S. Burroughs, Paul Bowles, and others. Now Anna Seghers’ 1944 novel Transit is brought to the screen from the German filmmaker Christian Petzold. When we meet Georg (Franz Rogowski) he is on the move, a witness to war, blood, and death. Unwittingly taking on the identity of a dead writer, he lands in the port city of Marseille, an “Interzone” of sorts, as part of France’s “free zone,” Marseille interchangeable with Tangier, another evocative port city where people hung out waiting for papers, exit visas, boat tickets, “transit.” Cue Casablanca, the classic film an illustration of Tangier’s midcentury international zone.

Akin to Burroughs’ phantasmagoric characters in Naked Lunch, Bowles’ ciphers Port and Kit from his Sheltering Sky, and Albert Camus’ Meursault, his “stranger,” Georg suffers anomie, attempting to connect with fervor, the survival skill of a man with much of his life’s journey before him; first, there’s a boy in Marseille’s Maghreb (or Moroccan) district. Playing ball and singing a lullaby from a lost boyhood, home, Georg falls prey to his memory. Then, with a young woman by chance awaiting the arrival of her husband, the identity he has taken on. Agitated, Marie flits by, a mysterious and haunting presence. As played by the lovely Paula Beer, she seems to have no weight at all, like all dreams, and states of consciousness.

Does the movie provide a glimpse into our present world’s transient populations forced to migrate with no place to go? I’m not sure, but Transit remains a film to see as it glimpses inner lives from a time when the idea of travel was more a metaphor for existence than tourism.

Regina Weinreich

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