Transit

"Are you bored? Haven’t you just had enough of these upsetting news reports? These exciting stories of barely escaping death, of breathless escape?"

Marseille 1940. Thousands are stranded in the French port town on the run from the Nazis. Trapped in an exhausting waiting game with the permanent fear of raids, they can neither move on nor go back. A race for papers begins at the city’s consulates: visas, transit visas, entry permits… having all of these complete is the only hope of getting passage out of Europe by ship. In the turmoil of escape, a young man named Seidler ends up with a dead man’s papers in his hands. Seidler becomes Weidel – at least on paper. When Seidler meets Marie, who has escaped with a German doctor, he falls in love – at first without knowing that Marie is still searching for her missing husband. Anna Seghers’ strongly autobiographically influenced novel Transit, which was made into a renowned film by Christian Petzold in 2018, is not only one of the most important pieces of German exile literature, but also a love story set in circumstances hostile to love.          

To celebrate the 125th birthday of Anna Seghers, Marie Schwesinger opens the fourth season of WORX, the international young directors programme, with a theatre production of "Transit". One of the things that interests Schwesinger, who studied theatrical arts in Hildesheim and directing in Frankfurt am Main, about "Transit" is the motif of the "useful refugee" and the continuity of derogatory speech about refugees, which still exists in the debates about asylum and refugees in the present day.