Marseille 1940: The Flight of Literature
By Uwe Wittstock
Polity. 240 pages. £25. ISBN-10:1509565426; ISBN-13: 978-1509565429
‘We all felt how profoundly and how terribly outside forces can reach
into a human being, to his innermost self. But we also sensed that in that
innermost core there was something that was unassailable and inviolable.’
Anna Seghers The Seventh Cross (1942)
The book also gives a welcome, detailed account of the passing months of
Varian Fry’s attempts to assist their passage to America. Fry’s activities
are surely ready for the big budget Hollywood treatment, even though America
doesn’t come out of the story too well [I found out, as I was finishing this
review, that his activities are in fact told in a recent Netflix
mini-series, Transatlantic —N.B. however, a critical consensus
declared it ‘Ably dramatizing a deadly serious chapter of World War II
history while also remembering to have fun.’ Fun?]
The events of Wittstock’s book take place in the months from May 1940
through to November of the following year. Initially it introduces the
book’s central characters in their circumstances. They are Germans,
often Jewish intellectuals, whose hostility to the new regime has drawn the
attention of the National Socialists. With Hitler’s accession to power in
Germany in 1933 some fled to France. Paris and then the south have been
preferred destinations. There they have made a second life for themselves,
but a vulnerable one. With the fall of France in 1940 and the increasing
internment of aliens, their lives are imperilled. Those in Vichy France (the
unoccupied southeastern part of the country) appear to be safer, though even
here the French authorities are required to surrender any German citizens
requested. Word gradually spreads that Marseille is the destination
for those refugees wishing to escape the country.
Wittstock follows the grim experiences of some of the starry names from the
German literary firmament travelling with their spouses: Heinrich and Nelly
Mann; Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger; Alma Mahler-Werfel and her novelist
husband, Franz; the communist author, Anna Seghers, her Hungarian husband
László Radványi and their children; Hannah Arendt and her second husband,
Heinrich Blücher; and the philosopher-cultural critic, Walter Benjamin. Then
there are artists and art theorists like André Breton and Max Ernst. Others
involved include lesser known writers, activists, philanthropists,
politicians, adventurers and enablers.
Because Wittstock’s narrative constantly switches focus between these German
refugees as they endure different tortured paths to Marseille and onward,
the book reads superbly as an episodic cliffhanger. Each episode is written
with a cinematic eye to narrative and Wittstock secures his prose with some
shrewd pencil portraits. Although the humanity and talent of his subjects is
never questioned, he makes no effort to whitewash them. For instance, Alma
Werfel (once Mahler’s wife) is portrayed as unpleasant and assertive: ‘tall,
very present, and always draped in flowing, ankle-length gowns with which
she conceals how much her pleasure in food and alcohol have bloated her.’ He
also touches on the relationships within these marriages. Of the
Feuchtwangers he writes, ‘The usual secrecy and uptightness associated with
screwing around are not to his taste. She, too, occasionally has affairs,
yet is much more discreet than he and not as indiscriminate.’
Anna Seghers’s experience is emblematic. While she is in Paris, her husband
Rodi is interned near La Vernet in South-Eastern France. She has managed to
find temporary places for her two children, each with a different friend,
while she resides with a third. But Paris is increasingly unsafe, since both
the German and French police increasingly conduct checks. She plans to take
the children to the unoccupied zone, to Pamiers, near her husband’s camp.
First they leave the train at Moulins, where she needs a travel pass to
cross from the occupied to unoccupied zone. By good fortune she meets a
sympathetic woman who assists her to cross the border illegally via stubbled
fields. Firstly her children go and then, impulsively, she herself.
Wittstock tells the tale dramatically, highlighting the constant tension.
The reader will pick up the family’s trail later in the book.
For those already in the south of France, the situation is still far from
perfect. Heinrich Mann has lived in Paris and then Nice since Hitler became
Chancellor. Having left-wing sympathies, he has always made himself
available for anti-Nazi activity and has recently completed a major novel,
Young Henry of Navarre. He and the much younger Nelly are recently
married, though she is neither an intellectual nor respectable, at least in
the eyes of his family. Mann’s problems are compounded by the sudden
unpopularity of Germans in France. Consequently his source of writing
revenues is drying up and the sixty-nine year old has been told by his
landlord to vacate their apartment.
Mahler and Werfel have been living in an old windmill in Sanary-sur-Mer,
despite their taste for the good life. The open suspicion of Germans and
Austrians like Mahler encourages them to leave for Marseille and then
Bordeaux — and then back to Marseille after a catalogue of disasters
(including the loss of their dozen suitcases, which are later, improbably,
found).
The Feuchtwangers, who left Germany in 1933, are also inhabitants of Sanary,
though wealthy ones. A vocal critic of the Nazis for some years,
Feuchtwanger is in particular danger with the fall of France. He has been
interned by his increasingly unsympathetic host country in Camp des
Milles on two occasions. His company there is notable. It includes
historian Golo Mann (son of Thomas), the lawyer and writer, Alfred
Kantorowicz, the Nobel chemist Otto Fritz Meyerhof, Max Ernst and other
public figures. Many like Feuchtwanger are Jewish. The inmates suffer near
starvation, oppressive heat and the constant fear of being turned over to
the Germans by the unreliable French authorities. In these overcrowded,
unsanitary camps, the inmates must fight-off indolence. In Anna Seghers’s
phrase, each has to ‘annihilate time’.
The tent camp that holds Feuchtwanger is eventually moved to Nîmes, away
from the advancing German army, but circumstances are absurdly confused and
only by amazing good fortune is the ailing author rescued from the loosely
guarded camp and driven to Marseille (disguised as a woman) at the
instructions of the American President, whose wife Eleanor Roosevelt is the
motivating force.
In this way America enters the narrative. The problem is that as a neutral
country the idea of the United States aiding escape is diplomatically
unacceptable. At the same time it must be said that ‘the nation’ disapproves
of increasing the quota of immigrants, even after ‘Kristallnacht’. To enter
America, refugees must have three documents: ‘first, an affidavit that
states that an American citizen pledges to vouch for them financially… a
morality affidavit, a kind of certificate of good character… and third, they
must present a biographical sketch that shows the extent of the danger posed
to them by the Nazis’. The morality
clause refers also to a ‘politically impeccable lifestyle’— the sticking
point for some left-wingers. (In July 1941 Roosevelt ups the ante, requiring
immigrants to have a close relative living in America and proof of
sufficient funds.)
The most well-known of the ERC failures is that of Walter Benjamin. The
story of his attempt to cross the border to Portbou is the final act of this
unworldly scholar with the bad heart. He had survived his two months in an
internment in Vernuche the previous year. In late September, led by the
indomitable Lisa Fittko who selflessly escorts many refugees to Spain, he
leaves with two Marseille acquaintances from the town of Banyuls-sur-Mer, on
a fifteen kilometre trail recommended by the town’s socialist mayor. The
difficulty of the early part of the trek necessitates a dry run in daylight.
Benjamin then decides to sleep out, because he is too exhausted to return to
the city.
He meets the group the next day and, with four women refugees who join them,
the party descends into Spain. Surprisingly, they are all arrested and
housed in a local hotel pending a return to France. Regulations regarding
French exit visas have just been tightened. Fearing another internment camp
or being handed over to the Germans, Benjamin takes his own life in bed that
night. Ironically, this results in the delay of the deportation of the rest
of the party and then, in a further irony, the following day the order
regarding exit papers is rescinded.
Such are the episodes encountered in February 1933. The author also
delves into the relationships between refugees and those involved in the
ERC. In an afterward he gives brief synopses of the later lives of the
characters. Constantly at odds with his own organisation in America, the
frustrated, locally harassed Fry is finally forced to leave France in
September 1941. He is dismissed by his own organisation the following
January. Wittstock notes that the only tribute Fry receives in his lifetime
comes in 1967. He adds, ‘What is surprising is how little recognition Varian
Fry and his people have received in Germany—although German cultural history
owes them quite a lot.’
Given all the travails it recounts, this admirable book is essentially a
celebration of the human spirit. It is a tribute to many known and unknown
French and American citizens who showed courage in the face of
unconscionable official neglect, in aiding clandestine travel, raising money
and organising escape routes for German refugees. It is also yet another
distressing reminder that anti-Semitism was —as it remains —a moral blight
on society.