Director Christian Petzold constructs and deconstructs the identity of political refugees in his 2018 drama, Transit. This scene particularly highlights the theme of manipulated identity, as it depicts a woman with many identities, and at the same time, none. Before I engage with the scene, I would like to recall a note by Hannah Arendt in her article “We Refugees.” In discussing the fate of mid-20th century Jewish refugees, she remembers, “Our identity is changed so frequently that nobody can find out who we actually are” (Arendt 116). Here, Arendt speaks of the many names and roles native peoples thrust upon European Jews seeking refuge in other nations, and how they lost their true identities as human beings upon exodus. Petzold illustrates such an identity crisis in this scene. 

 Officially identified as the “Architect” (IMDb), the woman in this scene takes on several identities. Here, we first know her as the ‘lady with the dogs’ since this is how Georg first sees her. When he crouches beside her, the woman opens the conversation by declaring her hatred for the dogs. Her expressed distaste simultaneously dissociates and associates her with them. By speaking about the dogs as a ticket for her exit from Marseille, she identifies herself as said ‘lady with the dogs.’ However, by explaining her desire to turn them to “mincemeat,” she distances herself from them, and by extension, from her identity as ‘lady with the dogs.’ This dysphoria exemplifies the identity crises many Jews experienced during Nazi occupation and thereafter (Arendt 115). The woman next identifies herself as a Jew, a title she never relinquishes, but never again emphasizes explicitly in the film. Though an integral layer to her identity, and the one that ultimately proves fatal, her Jewish identity falls second to a third, an architect. The woman coldly comments that she designed the dog owners’ house. As an educated and accomplished professional, she resents having been knocked down the social rung to ‘lady with the dogs at the mercy of past clients.’ The woman has been stripped of her identity and has been forced to assume a new, less dignified one.  

Her situation recalls another that Arendt describes regarding a Jewish refugee “who… finally exclaimed, ‘And nobody here knows who I am!’” as he tried to construct a new life for himself in a new place (115). Like the woman in Petzold’s film, the man in Arendt’s article experiences identity dysphoria because his original identity has been taken, and no matter how hard he tries to rebuild a respectable one, the world around him simply will not allow him to do so. Petzold further drives this point home by refusing to assign the woman a name. Though she is simultaneously three people – lady with the dogs, a Jew, and an architect – she is at the same time, nameless and thereby nobody. Her identity crisis forces her to cease to be a person, and in doing so, ultimately takes her life. Truly Arendt has it right when she says, “society has discovered discrimination as the great social weapon by which one may kill men without any bloodshed” (118).