Gate to the South: Back to Marseille | City Symphonies
„Walking down from the hills, I came to the outer precincts of Marseille. At a bend in the road, I saw the sea far below me. A bit later I saw the city itself spread out against the water. It seemed as bare and white as an African city. At last, I felt calm.” When Paul, the subjective narrator of Transit, published by Anna Seghers in 1944, discovers the panorama of Marseille coming in from Nazi-occupied Paris, the Corsican Quarter is still alive, and the hotel in Rue de la Provence, where the author herself had lived for a couple of months, was still functioning, hosting mysterious patrons. Years later, in 1977, a duo of West-German filmmakers, Ingemo Engström și Gerhard Theuring, went on the hunt for the emblematic places that turned Transit into the most important novel set in Marseille. They find the street and the disaffected hotel, then the increasingly pale traces of the old Corsican neighborhood, razed by the Nazi forces during the Second World War. Thanks to Anne Seghers we could find out – almost in “real-time” – what a determinant, frontline role Marseille had to play in the defeat of the Axis forces.
Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. He studied film theory in Grenoble, Paris, Dublin.
