Reading Victor Serge from the Depths of Defeat
Despite isolation, political defeat, and incalculable grief, the Russian revolutionary Victor Serge persisted in writing in collective rather than personal terms.
In Christian Petzold’s 2018 film Transit, a man assumes the identity of a dead anti-Nazi writer. He circles, alongside other refugees, among bureaucrats in Marseille in an attempt to secure the requisite paperwork to leave Europe. Although it is based on a 1944 novel of the same name by the German Jewish Communist Anna Seghers, […]