Marseille 1940: The Flight of Literature

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. (Aug.)