Fluchtweg nach Marseille (1977)

The directors Ingemo Engström and Gerhard Theuring described the content of their film as follows: “The subject of Escape Route to Marseille is the escape route taken by German émigrés in France in 1940/41. It describes an investigation against the backdrop of landscapes and cities that were once sites of persecution. The journey’s guiding motif is Anna Seghers’s novel Transit. Its principle of progression is moving and speaking photography.” Without following a rigid structure, Part 1 of the film is concerned more with the route “Anna Seghers took with her children,” from Paris via the Loire, Pamiers, and other cities to Marseille. Part 2 is concerned more with the situation of German émigrés in internment camps and in Marseille, which was free at first and later occupied. Finally, toward its end, the film moves into what are called the “landscapes of the Resistance.” The content is presented through a variable montage of the following elements: Actor Rüdiger Vogler quotes long passages from Anna Seghers’s novel. Just as the novel’s first-person narrator addresses an imagined listener, Vogler speaks to a young, silent listener. They are sitting by the glass frontage of a small pizzeria beside a boat harbor. The selected passages give a sketch of the novel’s plot and characters, but for the most part they are passages in which the narrator’s thoughts—and his somewhat detached observation of events in Marseille—come through clearly. The film always makes clear that it is the actor Rüdiger Vogler in 1977 who is quoting passages from the novel, not the “real” first-person narrator of 1941. In the film’s second part, actress Katharina Thalbach joins the cast. Alongside the first-person narrator, the novel’s character Marie now comes into focus. With the exception of two scenes, however, Thalbach’s appearances in the film are not performances of a role. Instead, in two long takes—one filmed during a lengthy car journey, the other at an open hotel window overlooking the church of Notre-Dame de la Garde—Thalbach offers her own reflections on the novel and its character Marie. Eyewitnesses recount, in uninterrupted, extended monologues, their memories of fleeing through France; their stays in internment camps and prisons; their encounters with Anna Seghers; obtaining the necessary visas and finally managing to leave Marseille by ship; or joining the Resistance. Photographs and film documents from the period of the German occupation of France, from June 1940 to August 1944, are also included. One film document, in the very first shot of the film, is a few years older. As the voice-over says, “It began in Berlin, 1933,” images show the book burning in Berlin on May 10, 1933. In addition to filming the actors and eyewitnesses, Engström and Theuring (cinematography: Axel Block) photographed and filmed numerous locations along their journey following Anna Seghers’s escape route. The sequence begins with the second shot in Part 1, showing the illuminated sign “La Capitale” on a Paris café, and ends with one of the final shots in Part 2: a view of a mountain gorge in the Vercors. Close-ups of numerous book covers and title pages appear, often with still frames from the film superimposed on them, visually establishing a connection between each book and the film. In addition to Anna Seghers’s Transit, these include, among others, Vladimir Pozner erinnert sich, Tschapajew – Das Bataillon der 21 Nationen, edited by Alfred Kantorowicz, and Rudolf Leonhard’s poetry cycle Le Vernet. Finally, there is a voice-over commentary, delivered alternately by a male and a female speaker (Reinhart Firchow and Hildegard Schmahl). The text makes clear that they speak on behalf of the filmmakers, conveying their intentions and decisions; they always say “we,” for example: “But we are searching for a lost story called Transit.”