Waiting in Line, Moving in Circles : Spaces of Instability in Christian Petzold’s Transit

Loosely based on a 1944 novel by German writer Anna Seghers and set in present-day France, Christian Petzold’s Transit is a story of fateful migration, in which conflicting agencies and shifting identities are translated into an aesthetic principle. Its fluctuating interrelations between images, texts, and temporalities transform the film into an ultimate “non-place,” which, except for a few hints at fascism and a refugee crisis, provides no explanation or overview of its political implications. Alongside the characters, spectators are thrown into a world defined by fragile image spaces and zones of exclusion, always haunted by fragments of the past and glimpses of an uncertain future.

Il tempo non lineare in Esterno giorno – Val Rosandra di Claudio Magris e in La gita delle ragazze morte di Anna Seghers

In Anna Seghers’ short story, Gita delle ragazze morte (1943-1944) and in Claudio Magris’ Esterno giorno – Val Rosandra (1982), a group of high school friends and their trip on the eve of World War I provide the narrative nucleus around which individual micro-histories meet macro-history. In the proposed analysis, the reason for the deprivation is identified as an element common to the two texts. In Seghers’ story, the temporal distance is cancelled out in a continuum, whereas Magris’ story operates through multiplication and fading between different typologies of texts: novel, screenplay, film, Goethe’s Faust, and short story.

Die drei Bäume von ANNA SEGHERS (Variationen über Furcht)

Als ANNA SEGHERS 1940 mit ihrer Familie versuchte, aus dem von der deutschen Wehrmacht besetzten Teil Frankreichs zu fliehen, schrieb sie Die drei Bäume, drei kurze Texte, die sich mit Angstgefühlen auseinandersetzen – es sind die Angst vor Verfolgung, vor Führungslosigkeit und vor Entfremdung. In der SEGHERS-Forschung haben diese kurzen Geschichten kaum Beachtung gefunden – sehr zu Unrecht, wie die Verfasserin anhand ihrer jahrzehntelangen Erfahrungen im Umgang mit den kurzen Geschichten darstellt.

1944-1958

This part recounts how, after they were liberated by the Russians, the author and his wife made their way to Warsaw. He then joined the Communist Party and began working for the Foreign Ministry. But since he did not adhere to the strict policies of the Communist Party, he was eventually imprisoned and dismissed from the party. This dismissal led to his work as a journalist and his return to German culture, and it enabled him to turn his love for German culture into a profession. From 1950 to 1958, he became the foremost Polish literary critic of German literature from the East and the West, and he befriended some of the most important writers and critics of the times, such as Anna Seghers, Bertolt Brecht, Hans Mayer, Siegfried Lenz, Heinrich Böll, and many of the members of the famous Group 47.