Without Lifting A Finger

This is the land of which it is said that the last war’s projectiles plow from the ground the projectiles of the war before the last.

Alluded to multiple times in Transit . Of course it's a large part of the machine the protagonist is caught up in. Thought I'd better review a little French history. Vichy France , officially The French State ( l'État français ), was France during the regime of Marshal Philippe Pétain , during World War II , from the German victory in the Battle of France (July 1940) to the Allied liberation in August 1944. [ 2 ] Following the defeat in June 1940, President Albert Lebrun appointed Marshal Pétain as Premier of France . After making peace with Germany, Pétain and his government voted to reorganize the discredited Third Republic into an authoritarian regime. The newly-formed French State maintained nominal sovereignty over the whole of French territory as defined by the Second Armistice at Compiègne . However, Vichy maintained full sovereignty only in the unoccupied southern Zone libre ("free zone"), while retaining limited authority in the Wehrmacht -...

The next day was windless and overcast. The air felt as gray as the gunboat still lying at anchor in the Old Harbor. People never tired of staring at it as if it could tell them what Admiral Darlan was planning to do with it. The British were approaching the Tripoli border. Would the French voluntarily surrender the harbor at Bizerte, or would they refuse? Would the Germans then occupy the south of France too? -- These were the questions of the day. If the latter were to happen, the British might bomb Marseille to smithereens. That, for the time being, would solve all transit visa worries. I went to the Cafe Mont Vertoux. The table where I'd sat the day before was free. I sat down, lit a cigarette, and waited. Waiting at the same place made no sense. But where else should I have waited?

     When the Mistral blew too hard, I would come to this pizzeria and sit at this same table. Back then I was surprised to find out that pizza wasn't sweet but tasted of pepper, olives, or sardines. I was usually light-headed with hunger, weak and tired, and almost always a little drunk, for I had only enough money to buy a slice of pizza and a glass of rose. Once inside the pizzeria I had only one difficult decision to make. Should I sit in the chair you're sitting in now, facing the harbor, or in the chair I'm in, facing the open fire? Each had its advantages. I could look for hours at the row of white houses on the other side of the Old Harbor behind the masts of the fishing boats under the evening sky. Or I could watch for hours as the cook beat and kneaded his dough, his arms diving into the fire as he fed it with fresh wood.

Started reading her Transit via Kindle (on a tip from Christa Wolf). * Anna Seghers (19 November 1900 – 1 June 1983) was a German writer famous for depicting the moral experience of the Second World War . The pseudonym Anna Seghers was apparently based on the surname of the Dutch painter and printmaker Hercules Pieterszoon Seghers or Segers (c. 1589 – c. 1638).