Transit

In the organizer's words:

Marseille 1940: Thousands stranded in the French port city as they flee from the Nazis. Trapped in a grueling state of waiting and in constant fear of raids, there is no going forwards or backwards. A race for papers begins at the city's consulates: visas, transit, passes... only if everything is complete is there any hope of a ship's passage out of Europe. In the confusion of the escape, the papers of a dead man fall into young Seidler's hands. Seidler becomes Weidel - at least on paper. When Seidler meets Marie, who has fled with a German doctor, he falls in love - without initially suspecting that Marie is still searching for her missing husband. Anna Seghers' strongly autobiographically influenced novel "Transit", which was prominently filmed by Christian Petzold in 2018, is not only one of the most important works of German exile literature, but also a love story under hostile circumstances.

To mark the 125th anniversary of Anna Seghers' birth, Marie Schwesinger opens the fourth season of WORX, the international young directors' program, with a production of "Transit". Schwesinger, who studied scenic arts in Hildesheim and directing in Frankfurt am Main, is interested in "Transit" in particular in the motif of the "useful refugee" and the continuity of derogatory language about refugees, which continues into the debates about asylum and flight in our present day.