Our Man in Marseille

Morten Høi Jensen reviews Uwe Wittstock’s “Marseille 1940: The Flight of Literature,” translated by Daniel Bowles.

By Morten Høi JensenOctober 17, 2025

• History

If it had not been for Varian Fry’s American Relief Committee, a goodly number of refugees would have had no reasonable course open to them but to jump into the sea from the height of the transporter-bridge, a certain enough method.
—Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1951)

BEFORE THE NAZI INVASION of France began in May 1940, the population of Marseille was around 900,000. As German forces swept through France and the Low Countries, forcing the Dunkirk evacuation and the fall of Paris, eight to 10 million civilians began fleeing southward in an unprecedented mass exodus. Hundreds of thousands of these people converged on Marseille, which after the June armistice remained the only international port outside direct German control. By August 1940, the city’s population had swelled by as many as half a million.

The shining white city was transformed into a purgatory for Europe’s most vulnerable and undesired: refugees from Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere; French colonial troops from Senegal, Algeria, Morocco, and Indochina; Russians fleeing Stalin; Spaniards fleeing Franco; Italians fleeing Mussolini—all of them filling the city’s streets and alleyways, lining up outside consulates in the baking summer heat, hoping for one of the many documents necessary for passage to North or South America.

The best chance of escape was to find a way to get to Lisbon, Portugal, the only city left on the continent from which transatlantic ocean liners were still setting sail. To get there, refugees in Marseille needed a French exit visa, a Spanish and a Portuguese transit visa, and proof that passage on a ship had already been booked and paid for. As a character in Anna Seghers’s 1944 novel Transit, which is set in Marseille, exasperatingly asks: “What purpose is there in holding on to people who want nothing more than to leave a country where they would be imprisoned if they stayed?”

Seghers is among a dozen or so refugees whose stories of escape are chronicled in an engrossing new book by the literary critic and editor Uwe Wittstock. Originally published in German last year, Marseille 1940: The Flight of Literature, in Daniel Bowles’s translation, follows a number of refugee writers and intellectuals living in France whose initial escape from Germany Wittstock had chronicled in his previous book, February 1933: The Winter of Literature (2021). When the Nazis invaded in 1940, those same writers once again found themselves at risk. “All at once, the government of the country that had so kindly taken them in after their escape from Hitler showed an entirely different side of itself,” Wittstock writes. French authorities closed the border and did not allow any expatriates to leave the country. In time, Marshal Pétain’s Vichy government did much worse.

Like its predecessor volume, Marseille 1940 unfolds in the present tense and offers a dramatic, kaleidoscopic account of the escapes of Hannah Arendt, Anna Seghers, Heinrich and Golo Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel, Hertha Pauli, Hans Natonek, Leonhard Frank, and Walter Mehring, among others. “Along with them,” Wittstock writes, “countless unknown persons faced the same dangers, but the traces of their lives have been lost in the chaos of war and flight.”

When the invasion came, Arendt, Golo Mann, and Feuchtwanger were among the tens of thousands herded into French internment camps, such as Gurs or Les Milles, anxiously hoping for release before the Gestapo could get hold of them. Others joined the convoy of civilians pouring out of Paris, hoping to stay out of sight of the strafing Luftwaffe. Then there were those like the novelist Ernst Weiss who could not bear yet another displacement and, instead of trying to escape, died by suicide in Paris.

Word about the eminent writers and artists at risk of falling into the hands of the Nazis spread quickly, in part because many of their friends, family, or colleagues had already fled abroad. In the United States, well-known émigré authors like Thomas Mann became deeply involved in attempts to secure emergency visas for imperiled writers, among them his older brother Heinrich and his son Golo, whose fate during the invasion remained unknown to him for several weeks.

In this struggle to help save Europe’s endangered writers, the most formidable obstacle often proved to be the United States itself. Despite Eleanor Roosevelt’s attempts at persuading him, President Franklin D. Roosevelt refused to relax entry requirements for refugees, instead creating an emergency visa program that, in Wittstock’s telling, was woefully inadequate to the massive task at hand. To obtain an American visa, refugees would have to produce three copies of three different documents, two of which had to be notarized. Once prepared, these documents were then sent to the President’s Advisory Committee for Political Refugees for examination and, for the lucky few, approval. Needless to say, it was an agonizingly lengthy process.

Here’s where Varian Fry comes in. A young intellectual with a background in Latin and Greek, Fry worked as the chief editor of the Foreign Policy Association in New York. On May 16, 1940, he received a phone call from Paul Hagen (real name Karl Frank), an Austrian anti-fascist also living in New York, asking Fry to meet him at the Childs’ diner on 42nd Street. Over lunch, Hagen explained the imminent danger the Nazi invasion of France posed to a whole generation of European cultural figures. The Gestapo had prepared lists of individuals and were systematically planning to comb through occupied territories and deport these undesirables to concentration camps.

At once, Fry and Hagen set about drafting what became known as the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC). By late June, they’d even managed to put together a fundraising luncheon at the Commodore Hotel attended by 200 guests. Moving quickly, the ERC named University of Newark president Frank Kingdon as its chairman and set up an office at the Chanin Building on East 42nd Street in Manhattan. Many prominent figures, including Eleanor Roosevelt, the journalist Dorothy Thompson, and Alfred H. Barr Jr., the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, supported the ERC as best they could, providing funds of their own or helping to raise them.

It was Erika Mann, Thomas Mann’s daughter, who first advocated for opening an office in Marseille, the largest city in the unoccupied zone. Fry volunteered to be the ERC’s man in Marseille. On August 4, he boarded the Dixie Clipper for Lisbon, arriving 10 days later in a hopelessly overcrowded city teeming with refugees lined up outside the various consulates and aid organizations. Once there, he enlisted the help of three Americans—the socialist Frank Bohn, the painter Miriam Davenport, and the heiress Mary Jayne Gold—as well as the German Jewish economist Albert O. Hirschman (real name Otto-Albert Hirschmann) and the Austrian Catholic Franz von Hildebrand. Eventually, when the lines forming outside Fry’s hotel room began attracting too much attention from the local police, Fry and his new associates opened an office for a phony aid organization called the Centre Américain de Secours (American Relief Committee), thereby setting up a legal facade for what, in the new reality of Vichy France, was a highly illegal operation.

Because Wittstock devotes a chapter to each month of the summer and fall of 1940, we are able to see the way Fry’s operation functioned on an almost day-to-day basis, giving us a sense of the extraordinary courage and resourcefulness of those involved. Hirschman in particular stands out: a former member of the Young Socialist Workers, he fled his native Berlin after Hitler came to power, continuing his studies at the Sorbonne in Paris and the London School of Economics, before eventually receiving his doctorate from the University of Trieste in 1938. In addition to brains and charm, Hirschman had useful experience in anti-fascist underground activity, and plenty of street smarts to boot. Within days of joining Fry’s operation, he had a foot in Marseille’s criminal underworld, procuring fake passports, access to secure hiding places, and valuable information about the best escape routes across the French-Spanish border.

Varian Fry, of course, is the real show-stealer. Wittstock portrays him as idealistic yet dogged, a man with a moral flame burning hot inside him—a quiet American, as Andy Marino called him in his biography, though not in the slightly sinister sense of Graham Greene’s novel of the same title. Fry was a quiet man with a lot of noise inside him—prickly, gloomy, prone to periods of depression. “It was endlessly fascinating to figure him out,” Hirschman later wrote. “There was in him a delightful mixture of earnest resolve and of wit, of methodical, almost formal demeanor and of playfulness.”

It’s as good as impossible to imagine anyone else doing what Fry did. As soon as he reached Marseille, he simply disappeared into the assignment. It took him just a few days to locate and meet with Heinrich Mann, Hertha Pauli, Leonhard Frank, Walter Mehring, Franz Werfel, and Alma Mahler-Werfel. He quickly obtained a hand-drawn map of a mountain path leading into Spain that he hid behind the bathroom mirror of his hotel room. He also discovered—to his surprise—that one of the most important names on his list, Lion Feuchtwanger, had already been sprung from a French internment camp by an unlikely source.

Feuchtwanger had spent two months in subhuman conditions in Les Milles and Nîmes, where typhus and dysentery were epidemic. In Les Milles, he saw his friend and fellow writer Walter Hasenclever die from a self-inflicted overdose of Veronal. He himself had endured a bout of bacterial dysentery and was in poor health. But being a top priority for the Nazis made him a priority for the Americans too. Under pressure from his wife, Roosevelt urged the rescue of Feuchtwanger by all possible means. In late July, two vice US consuls, Miles Standish and Harry Bingham IV, conspired to smuggle Feuchtwanger out of Nîmes and hide him in Bingham’s villa.

By mid-to-late September 1940, Fry and his Centre de Secours had already saved hundreds of refugees, including Werfel, Mahler-Werfel, Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger, and Heinrich and Golo Mann. Fry himself escorted them for part of their audacious trek into Spain, which included a hike through the mountainous terrain between Cerbère and Portbou across the border. But the danger of such a crossing was made tragically clear on September 25, when a group of refugees that included Walter Benjamin was arrested by Spanish customs agents for not possessing French exit visas. They were to be deported back to France the next day. Benjamin, having already spent two months in a French internment camp in Vernuches earlier that year, could not take it any longer and killed himself later that night by taking 50 morphine tablets, “enough to kill a horse.”

Despite Fry’s impressive early successes, he just as quickly ran into trouble with local French authorities and, as a result, the State Department back home. When the prefect of the département in Marseille filed a complaint with US Consul General Hugh Fullerton, the State Department cabled back:

THIS GOVERNMENT CANNOT […] COUNTENANCE THE ACTIVITIES AS REPORTED OF DR. BOHN AND MR. FRY AND OTHER PERSONS IN THEIR EFFORTS IN EVADING THE LAWS OF COUNTRIES WITH WHICH THE UNITED STATES MAINTAIN FRIENDLY RELATIONS

In early October, the State Department warned the ERC that Fry was in violation of French law and in danger of being arrested.

Thus began a long tug-of-war between Fry in Marseille, the ERC in New York, and the State Department in Washington, DC. The more New York demanded his return, the less willing Fry was to leave. Even his wife Eileen had no luck trying to persuade him. Fry kept insisting that he still had names to cross off his list. People depended on him, but it was also the case that Fry had stumbled into a profound sense of purpose. Every hour of every day was spent in service of this purpose; no time was ever lost or frittered away. The needs of others silenced the noise inside him.

What’s more, Fry formed strong bonds with the people he spent his days with. Many of them had grown so close that, in November 1940, they decided to rent a tumbledown château, the Villa Air Bel, which had 18 rooms, a large library, and strange, mythology-themed wallpaper. Mary Jayne Gold and Miriam Davenport ran it like a private hotel, employing a cook and two housemaids. Tenants included not just Centre de Secours co-workers but also an unlikely roster of notable refugees including the revolutionary writer Victor Serge and the surrealists André Breton and Max Ernst. In his Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Serge writes that they nicknamed the villa “Espervisa” (Hope for Visa).

All these characters and storylines, some not even mentioned here, make for a vivid and novelistic reading experience. As with February 1933, Wittstock’s narrative flair creates an absorbing sense of immediacy, a fleeting impression of what daily life for these people might have felt like. At the same time, it’s worth asking whether too much historical context is being sacrificed for page-turning purposes. We learn little more than the basics about what exactly was going on politically in the year 1940—who Marshal Pétain was exactly, why Vichy France willingly persecuted its Jewish population, and what ideological or political pressures determined the American government’s unyielding attitude to refugees. Incorporating all of this would have made for a longer book, so maybe we can chalk it up to considerations of economy and length. But even so, I doubt I’m the only reader who would’ve happily spent another 200 pages in the company of Wittstock and his characters.

The final chapters of Marseille 1940 unfold like the denouement of some tragic drama. Despite failures and losses, Fry’s Centre de Secours never wavered in its efforts, and by April 1941, over 1,000 refugees had escaped (that number would eventually double). But it is in the nature of clandestine work that the longer it goes on, the greater the challenges become. Wittstock relates the moment when Fry, upon learning that French police have become aware of Hirschman’s fake identity (he was using the name “Albert Hermant”), has to inform his friend that his cover has been blown: “For a moment, Hirschmann gazes out the window, then turns to Fry, smiles, and shakes his hand. There is not much to say. He heads directly to the train station, without again setting foot in his apartment, and catches the next train to Banyuls.” Then, in early January 1941, French officials began arresting prominent exiles and handing them over to the Gestapo.

What Fry probably didn’t expect was that he would be betrayed by his own government. Eventually, the American embassy in Vichy had quite simply had enough of him. In June 1941, 10 months after he’d first arrived in France, Fry received a summons by the police chief of Marseille. The American embassy had alerted the French authorities to the fact that Fry’s passport had long since expired. Wittstock even cites internal memoranda demonstrating that members of the ERC board had accused Fry of becoming a “radical” mostly concerned with saving communist refugees. In July, Roosevelt tightened restrictions on immigration to the United States and terminated the emergency visa program.

On his reluctant return to the US in November 1941, Fry was greeted not as a heroic escape agent who had helped save 2,000 European writers and intellectuals but instead as a pariah. The ERC wanted nothing more to do with him. In 1942, his wife filed for divorce and the FBI began surveilling him. He had professional stints at The New Republic and the International Rescue Committee, but nothing ever mattered the way Marseille mattered. He married a second time and the couple had three children, but they eventually separated. After finding work as a high school Latin teacher in Connecticut, he died of a stroke in his home in 1967, at age 59.

Marseille 1940 helps set the record straight of a man who saved thousands when the United States was turning away those huddled masses yearning for freedom. In these reactionary times, when millions of refugees are at risk all across the world, Wittstock’s book ought to shame us all into action.