Negotiating Borders in Anna Seghers’ and Christian Petzold’s Transit

This paper focuses on the negotiation of borders in Anna Seghers’ novel Transit (1944) and Christian Petzold’s film of the same name (2018). Inspired by the German-Jewish communist writer’s own experience of traversing borders, Seghers’ Exilroman describes the torment of a nameless refugee from Germany waiting to escape Marseille, one of the last open frontiers in a Europe ravaged by National Socialism. 70 years later, the Berlin School director’s multilingual film delves into the history of displacement and nationalism in Europe by setting the 1940s fascist persecution amongst the refugee crisis in present-day France. Petzold’s distinctive trans-period approach gives a voice to the marginalized and displaced in two centuries and from two continents, making it impossible to separate ‘old’ from ‘new’ Europe. Presenting expulsion and migration as timeless phenomena, Petzold speaks to the historical fluctuation of borders and movement of populations. Both authors construe the crossing of borders as loss of identity and alienation, but offer different solutions, if any, to what they perceive as an existential as well as political predicament.