Marseille 1940
The Flight of Literature
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
June 1940: France surrenders to Germany. The Gestapo is searching for Heinrich Mann and Franz Werfel, Hannah Arendt, Lion Feuchtwanger and many other writers and artists who had sought asylum in France since 1933. The young American journalist Varian Fry arrives in Marseille with the aim of rescuing as many as possible. This is the harrowing story of their flight from the Nazis under the most dangerous and threatening circumstances.
It is the most dramatic year in German literary history. In Nice, Heinrich Mann listens to the news on Radio London as air-raid sirens wail in the background. Anna Seghers flees Paris on foot with her children. Lion Feuchtwanger is trapped in a French internment camp as the SS units close in. They all end up in Marseille, which they see as a last gateway to freedom. This is where Walter Benjamin writes his final essay to Hannah Arendt before setting off to escape across the Pyrenees. This is where the paths of countless German and Austrian writers, intellectuals and artists cross. And this too is where Varian Fry and his comrades risk life and limb to smuggle those in danger out of the country. This intensely compelling book lays bare the unthinkable courage and utter despair, as well as the hope and human companionship, which surged in the liminal space of Marseille during the darkest days of the twentieth century.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist and critic Wittstock (February 1933) offers a riveting chronicle of the famed Emergency Rescue Committee and its frantic efforts to evacuate writers and artists from Vichy France. The narrative tracks several major figures, among them American intellectual Varian Fry, the scheme's mastermind, who worked to secure visas for prominent intellectuals as they arrived in Marseille. Much of the account is spent profiling the writers as they gather in the port city or elsewhere along the Vichy border, where many are forced to make impossible decisions. Alongside the well-known account of Walter Benjamin's suicide after he was denied entry to Spain, Wittstock relays other stories of artists making harrowing choices, like novelist Anna Seghers's destruction of what she believed might be the last existing manuscript of her anti-Nazi novel The Seventh Cross. Wittstock's character sketches are vivid and enticing, especially that of an utterly magnetic Victor Serge, who becomes a dominant force in the narrative after entering it halfway through. The book also chronicles an increasingly harried Fry's frustrations with his slow-moving colleagues across the Atlantic, as well as his gradual transition from aid work to something more akin to resistance as he helps British soldiers marooned during the Dunkirk evacuation. The narrative is thrilling and hauntingly resonant; as Wittstock notes, "taking a stand for a world-famous man" is "easy" compared to rescuing an "anonymous refugee." Readers will be engrossed.
