Race, reaction and the fight for democratic rights: The political issues posed by the Cofnas meeting at Oxford

 The announcement that Nathan Cofnas, the self-described “race realist” whose writings have provoked widespread controversy, is to speak at Oriel College, University of Oxford, has become the focus of a political confrontation whose significance extends far beyond another dispute over freedom of speech on a university campus. Cofnas is scheduled to speak on 17 November at a meeting organised by the recently established Oxon Universities’ Reform Society, entitled An Evening with Nathan Cofnas: Is DEI Undermining Higher Education? Stand Up To Racism Oxfordshire has announced a protest outside the college and launched an open letter calling on Oriel College and the University of Oxford to refuse to host the meeting and support the society’s disaffiliation.

The controversy raises fundamental questions about the growth of the nationalist right, efforts to rehabilitate racialist views of society, the crisis of identity politics and, no less importantly, the defence of democratic rights. There must be uncompromising political opposition to attempts to explain social inequality through racial hierarchy or biological determinism. But that opposition must be distinguished from calls for university administrators to suppress meetings and decide which political views students may hear. The campaign to cancel the Cofnas meeting risks replacing administrative prohibition with political struggle.

It invites the authorities of one of Britain’s wealthiest and most prestigious universities to define the limits of legitimate political discourse. This perspective does not strengthen the struggle against reaction; it weakens it by shifting political responsibility away from students and workers and onto institutions whose role is not to emancipate society, but to administer a significant part of the existing social order. The racialist right must be confronted and defeated politically, intellectually and socially—not granted the status of persecuted dissidents through administrative bans.

Cofnas is an American philosopher and postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University who studied at Oxford, Cambridge, and Columbia. He has described himself as a “race realist” and is known for arguing that genetic differences contribute to average racial differences in intelligence. Overheard at Oxford reports that mainstream scientific critics reject his hereditarian position and that the Cambridge branch of the University and College Union has described his work as “race pseudo-science”.

The political significance of these arguments extends beyond the immediate academic controversies. Historically, biological explanations of racial inequality have served a clear ideological purpose: they recast conditions shaped by history and social relations as supposedly natural—and therefore more or less immutable—differences between human populations. As a result, inequalities in wealth, educational achievement, and social position no longer need to be explained by poverty, inherited wealth, unequal access to education, the organisation of employment, or society's class structure. Instead, they can be attributed, wholly or partly, to supposedly inherited differences between populations. This helps explain why biological determinism and eugenic doctrines have historically been so valuable to defenders of hierarchy.

They made existing inequality appear scientifically inevitable. Contemporary hereditarian arguments arise in a different historical context, and their proponents often distance themselves from earlier racial ideologies. Still, attempts to explain racialised social inequality biologically must face the most rigorous scientific, historical and political scrutiny.

The immediate backdrop to the Oxford meeting is the bitter controversy surrounding the late Cambridge sociologist Arday. Cofnas publicly accused him of plagiarising his doctoral thesis. Arday denied plagiarism but acknowledged mistakes in his doctoral work. Liverpool John Moores University, which awarded his doctorate, concluded that his degree should stand. Cambridge University later announced an investigation, citing what it described as new information about his qualifications and honorary appointments. Arday resigned and died later in August. The controversy cannot simply be dismissed as an invented allegation: Africa News reported that The Times had separately examined Arday’s thesis and identified passages it characterised as “identical or near-identical” to another researcher’s work. Questions were also raised about claims concerning his sporting and charitable activities.

But legitimate questions about academic standards could not justify turning an investigation into an escalating campaign of public denunciation that destroyed an individual. After Arday’s death, his family said a “campaign of misinformation” had become “too much for Jason” and that he had experienced a “campaign of sustained abuse”. The response to his death reflected widespread anger.

A Press Association report said that more than 30,000 people attended a vigil in Trafalgar Square, where Diane Abbott called the campaign against Arday “vicious” and “bitter”. By contrast, Lord Woolley described his death as a “public execution” and a “lynching”. These statements undoubtedly reflected genuine outrage. But the political framework through which much of the controversy has been interpreted—one that treats racial identity as the fundamental explanation for the conflict—obscures the deeper social and class processes at work.

The Arday affair exposes the profound contradictions of the diversity politics that has come to dominate universities, corporations and substantial sections of official political life. Within this framework, social progress is increasingly measured by the racial and gender composition of those occupying positions of prestige. Who becomes a professor, university administrator, corporate director, or senior politician becomes the principal measure of equality. But diversifying an elite does not abolish inequality. A university can celebrate the racial diversity of its senior leadership while students confront debt and academic employees experience insecure employment. Corporations can diversify their boardrooms without altering the relationship between shareholders and workers. Government institutions can promote representatives from different ethnic backgrounds while presiding over policies that increase poverty and social inequality. The composition of privileged layers can change considerably without transforming the social relationships upon which privilege itself rests.

The political right has learned to exploit precisely this contradiction. Reaction accepts the racial framework of liberal identity politics but reverses its direction. Where official diversity programmes attribute significance to the representation of minorities, the right declares that these same minorities have received unfair advantages. Where identity politics speaks of historical oppression, reaction increasingly portrays white people as the victims of institutional discrimination. Where liberalism invokes “lived experience”, its opponents appropriate the same terminology for themselves.

The statement issued by the Oxon Universities’ Reform Society regarding Cofnas demonstrates this process with almost parodic clarity. It claimed that he had been “repeatedly victimised with stigmatising language and structural apartheid by those with institutional power and privilege” and presented allowing space for his “lived experiences” as a means of rebalancing representation at Oxford. The rhetorical inversion is deliberate. The right has discovered that identity categories can be detached from progressive intentions and redeployed as instruments of reaction.

The development of the Oxon Universities’ Reform Society must itself be taken seriously. Registered with the University of Oxford in August, its announced programme has included Andrew Rosindell, Jim Allister, Neema Parvini and Cofnas. Its emergence points to a conscious effort to establish nationalist-right ideas among university students. We cannot counter this with the complacent assumption that reactionary politics will collapse merely because its arguments seem offensive to prevailing academic conventions.

The right seeks to capitalise upon a deepening alienation from institutions whose rhetoric of inclusivity increasingly conflicts with lived experiences of economic insecurity. Young people are continually assured that society is becoming more inclusive and progressive, even as secure employment, affordable housing, and financial independence become increasingly difficult to obtain. Reaction takes this social anger and provides it with a false target. Migrants, minorities, multiculturalism, “wokeness” and DEI become the explanation for contradictions rooted in capitalist society itself.

The international dimensions of the controversy surrounding Cofnas underscore the seriousness of these developments. Ghent University suspended Cofnas in August after his public statements about the Arday affair. The Press Association later reported that US ambassador Bill White pressured the university to reinstate him. More detailed reporting by Overheard at Oxford says the university replaced the original suspension with a three-month measure under which Cofnas works remotely, cannot teach, and must restrict his research to the subjects covered by his appointment, while an investigation continues. These details make clear the need to treat claims of simple “reinstatement” cautiously. Still, the reported involvement of an American ambassador shows that what might initially appear to be an internal university controversy has already intersected with wider political conflicts over academic freedom, DEI, and right-wing politics.

Under these circumstances, Stand Up To Racism Oxfordshire's demand that university authorities prevent the meeting is politically misguided. There is every justification for demonstrating against racism, exposing its scientific pretensions and challenging the programme of the nationalist right. But protesting a political meeting and asking the authorities to prohibit it are fundamentally different political acts. The first constitutes the exercise of democratic rights by students and workers. The second transfers political power to an administrative apparatus and asks it to determine the boundaries of permissible political discourse. Once the principle is established that university management should decide which political organisations can meet and which political opinions students are permitted to hear, no progressive mechanism guarantees that such powers will always be exercised in a way that respects the right.

The defence of freedom of speech must therefore be separated from political agreement with the ideas being expressed. Cofnas has the right to advance his arguments, and students and workers possess the equally essential right to condemn and oppose them. Those rights are not contradictory. Political freedom depends upon both. A mass political demonstration against racism represents the active exercise of democratic rights. In contrast, administrative cancellation removes the political issue from students and workers and hands it to the university bureaucracy. Suppression also supplies the right with its preferred mythology. Movements that seek to portray themselves as persecuted outsiders challenging an intolerant liberal establishment benefit enormously whenever their opponents attempt to prevent them from speaking. They can then present arguments that ought to be subjected to ruthless criticism as forbidden truths that powerful institutions supposedly fear.

More fundamentally, the growth of racial politics cannot be understood apart from the social conditions that make reaction possible. Britain is characterised by immense private wealth alongside declining public provision and profound economic insecurity. Millions struggle with housing costs, deteriorating services and uncertainty about their future. Under such circumstances, nationalist politics offers an explanation deliberately calculated to conceal society's structure. Migrants become responsible for housing shortages, refugees for overstretched services, multiculturalism for social fragmentation and diversity policies for declining opportunities. Each such argument directs social anger horizontally toward another section of the population instead of vertically toward concentrations of wealth and economic power.

This is why the struggle against racism cannot ultimately be separated from the struggle against capitalism. Marxism does not deny racial discrimination or minimise its consequences. It explains racial oppression historically and socially rather than treating race as the fundamental organising principle of human society. Workers do not stop sharing common material interests because they have different skin colours, religions, or national origins. On the contrary, ruling classes have repeatedly exploited such differences precisely because workers share interests that transcend national and racial divisions. When workers are persuaded to understand each other principally as members of competing racial communities, their capacity for common political action is undermined.

The answer to racialism is therefore not an alternative system of racial politics with more progressive objectives. Black workers and white workers, British-born workers and migrants, Christian, Muslim, Jewish and non-religious workers cannot emancipate themselves through competition for privileges within the existing social structure. Their common interests lie in transforming that structure. The great historical strength of socialist internationalism is its insistence that humanity can overcome racial and national antagonisms only by attacking their material foundations and uniting working people across the divisions cultivated by the ruling class.

The 17 November meeting should therefore become an occasion for political clarification rather than administrative censorship. Students and academics should expose the history and scientific weaknesses of racial determinism. Workers and young people should oppose attempts to blame migrants and minorities for the social crisis. They should challenge the nationalist programme associated with Reform UK and reject efforts to turn legitimate anger over deteriorating living standards into hostility towards vulnerable sections of society. At the same time, they should oppose attempts to hand university authorities powers to suppress political organisations. A movement genuinely capable of confronting reaction requires confidence in political argument and mass mobilisation, not reliance upon administrative prohibition.

This dispute ultimately concerns something much greater than whether Nathan Cofnas speaks for ninety minutes in an Oxford lecture theatre. The return of racialist ideas is one manifestation of a broader political crisis produced by staggering inequality, declining confidence in established institutions and the absence of a mass socialist alternative through which social opposition can find progressive expression. Reaction grows by exploiting this vacuum. It transforms class antagonism into nationalism, economic insecurity into hostility towards migrants and social inequality into competition between racial groups. Its arguments acquire influence not because racial pseudoscience has suddenly become intellectually convincing, but because conditions of profound social crisis create opportunities for forces that divert anger away from capitalism.

Fighting this danger requires a fundamentally different orientation. Students and workers must oppose racism without surrendering democratic rights, defend migrants and minorities without accepting the fragmentation of society into competing racial constituencies, and confront the nationalist right without placing themselves politically under the authority of the institutions of the existing order. Above all, they must recognise that the fundamental social division is not between white and black, native-born and migrant, or one nationality and another, but between the working class, whose collective labour sustains society, and the capitalist class that controls its productive resources and appropriates its wealth.

Racial pseudoscience will not be defeated by persuading Oriel College to lock the doors of a lecture theatre. Nor will administrative rulings from university authorities halt the growth of the nationalist right. We must defeat these forces in open political struggle by exposing the social interests they serve and removing the conditions on which they feed. That demands building an independent socialist movement that unites workers and young people across every racial and national division in opposition to inequality, nationalism, and the capitalist system itself.

 

Berlin Shuffle: Boschwitz's portrait of Weimar's outcasts on the eve of catastrophe

Written in exile when its author was barely 21 and published only in Swedish during his lifetime, Berlin Shuffle is a portrait of the human wreckage German capitalism produced in the year the Great Depression began. Its English appearance, nearly nine decades later, is a significant literary event. It also arrives at a moment when the social conditions it depicts mass impoverishment, a political establishment indifferent to low-income people, and the far right's cultivation of resentment are again visible across Europe and the United States.

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz (1915–1942) is now best known for The Passenger (Der Reisende), written a few weeks after the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom and rediscovered in an archive eight decades later. Philip Boehm’s 2021 English translation became an international bestseller. Berlin Shuffle, the English title for Boschwitz’s debut Menschen neben dem Leben (literally “People Beside Life”), was first published in German in 2019. Boehm’s translation appeared in the US in December 2025 and in Britain in January 2026.

The novel follows a handful of Berlin down-and-outs over a single day in 1929, ending in a drunken eruption of violence in a dance hall on the city’s edge. It contains no Nazis and barely mentions politics. Yet, as several reviewers have noted, it captures with uncanny clarity the social atmosphere from which fascism drew its shock troops. That achievement, and its limits, deserve careful examination.

A life shaped by war, fascism and exile

Boschwitz was born in Berlin on 19 April 1915. His father, Salomon Boschwitz, a Jewish factory owner who had converted to Christianity, served in the Imperial Army and died weeks after his son’s birth. His mother, Martha, came from a patrician family in Lübeck.

In 1935, the year of the Nuremberg race laws, Boschwitz’s uncle, the lawyer Alexander Wolgast, was murdered in the street after criticising the Nazi legislation. That same year, Ulrich received call-up papers for the Wehrmacht and fled to Scandinavia with his mother. In Norway he wrote Menschen neben dem Leben, which appeared in Stockholm in 1937 as Människor utanför, under the pseudonym John Grane. Its modest success allowed him to study at the Sorbonne.

The next years were an odyssey through Luxembourg, France and Belgium before mother and son reached England in 1939. On the outbreak of war, the British government interned them as “enemy aliens,” indifferent to the fact that they were refugees from Hitler. In July 1940, Boschwitz was deported to Australia aboard the HMT Dunera, notorious for the brutal treatment of its passengers. During the voyage, a guard threw overboard the only draft of his third novel.

He spent two years in camps at Hay and Tatura, revising The Passenger and beginning another novel. Released in 1942, he sailed for Britain. On 29 October 1942, his ship, the MV Abosso, was torpedoed by the German submarine U-575. Boschwitz was among the 362 who died. He was 27, and his manuscripts went down with him.

His life thus traced, in compressed form, the fate of a generation: born into the imperialist slaughter of 1914–18, driven out by fascism, and then treated as suspect by the “democratic” powers that claimed to be fighting it.

One day among the “people beside life”

The novel’s German title is more precise than its English one. Boschwitz’s characters live beside life: pushed to the margins of a society that has no use for them. The action unfolds over one day in 1929. Philip Boehm’s introduction rightly draws attention to its “cinematic structure”, cutting between figures who drift across the city before converging at night on a cheap dance hall and bar, the Jolly Huntsman.

At the centre is Fundholz, a beggar who had a respectable life only a decade earlier, and his companion Tönnchen, an obese, childlike man damaged by a tragedy in his youth. Fundholz shepherds him with exasperation and tenderness. The pair begin the novel in a damp cellar room and spend much of the day avoiding the police, who see any poor man as a potential vagrant.

Around them circle others. Grissmann, an unemployed former streetcar conductor sacked years earlier over 20 missing marks, is consumed by humiliation and a craving for power. Max Sonnenberg, blinded in the war, bullies his young wife, Elsi. Minchen Linder, a mistress to older men, and her boyfriend Wilhelm Winter, a petty criminal and pimp, round out the night’s company. A widow, Frau Fliebusch, wanders the streets refusing to believe that her husband died in the war more than ten years before.

Over drink and dancing, Elsi turns to Grissmann. Jealousy and schnapps do the rest: a quarrel between Grissmann and Sonnenberg ends in catastrophe and a collective frenzy. The Guardian’s reviewer called the conclusion fittingly explosive, while describing the whole as funny and light on its feet despite its grim material.

Boschwitz is unsentimental. His men treat women with contempt, and David Herman, reviewing for the Jewish Chronicle, identifies misogyny as perhaps the book’s dominant theme. Nor does he idealise poverty. Hunger makes people cunning and cruel; solidarity, where it exists, is fragile and grudging. Yet the novel is also full of grotesque comedy, and its shabby figures move through a Berlin of trams, the U-Bahn, cinemas and taxis, the bright surface of Weimar modernity that excludes them.

Berlin, 1929: the year everything broke

The choice of 1929 is not incidental. The brief “stabilisation” of the mid-1920s, financed by American loans, was ending. After the Wall Street Crash in October, lenders recalled those loans, and German unemployment climbed from around 1.3 million in mid-1929 to more than 6 million in 1932, nearly a third of the workforce.

The political consequences were swift. The Nazi Party won just 2.6 per cent of the vote in the 1928 Reichstag election. By September 1930 it took 18.3 per cent, and by July 1932, 37.3 per cent, making it the largest party. Its electoral base lay above all in the ruined middle classes. Still, it also recruited heavily among the declassed, the long-term unemployed and embittered war veterans: precisely the milieu Boschwitz describes.

1929 was also the year of the Blutmai. On 1 May, Berlin's Social Democratic (SPD) police chief, Karl Zörgiebel, enforced a ban on May Day demonstrations. Over three days, police killed 33 people, most of them uninvolved residents of working-class districts, and arrested more than 1,200. The massacre deepened the gulf between the two mass workers’ parties, the SPD and the Communist Party (KPD).

That split proved fatal. The SPD leadership tied the working class to defending a bankrupt bourgeois republic. The Stalinised KPD, following the Comintern’s ultra-left “Third Period” line, denounced Social Democrats as “social fascists” and rejected a united front against the Nazis. From exile, Leon Trotsky repeatedly warned from 1930 that this policy was leading to catastrophe and called for a workers’ united front to smash the fascist gangs before they took power.

Trotsky’s analysis also illuminates Boschwitz’s characters. In his September 1930 article on the German elections, he explained how the crisis drove the petty bourgeoisie and the declassed toward fascism when the workers’ parties offered no revolutionary way out. Writing after Hitler’s victory, he observed that “a particle of Hitler is lodged in every exasperated petty bourgeois”. Fundholz, Grissmann and Sonnenberg are not petty bourgeois in the strict sense; several have fallen out of the working class or the lower middle class altogether. But their rage, impotence and contempt for those weaker than themselves are the raw material that fascism organised.

Achievement and limits

Boschwitz’s greatest strength is his eye. He renders the physical texture of poverty- the damp walls, the hunger that never quite lets up, the calculations over a few pfennig- with a concreteness that recalls the drawings of George Grosz and the paintings of Otto Dix. The Jewish Chronicle review compares the atmosphere to Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera and Max Beckmann's work. Lawrence De Maria, in the Washington Independent Review of Books, writes that the author recreates Berlin’s squalor so completely that the reader can almost taste it.

The novel also shows a psychological acuity remarkable for such a young writer. Grissmann’s self-pity curdling into a desire for revenge, Sonnenberg’s tyranny over the one person weaker than himself, the crowd’s readiness to be swept up in violence: these are drawn without moralising. Kirkus found the book’s main strength in showing, in everyday terms, the atmosphere in which a fascist government could arise.

But the limits are real and should be stated. The novel views society largely from below and from the side, among those already expelled from production. The organised working class, millions strong in Berlin, the city of “Red Wedding,” of strikes, mass parties and mass demonstrations, is almost absent. As Herman notes, there are passing references to Hindenburg and Ludendorff but little sense of the rising far right. Low-income people appear as victims of fate and of one another, not as members of a class capable of changing their conditions.

This is not simply the author's personal failing. Boschwitz wrote in 1936–37, after the German working class had gone down to defeat without a fight, betrayed by the leaderships of both the SPD and the KPD. The novel's pervasive pessimism, its sense of people trapped and turning on each other, reflects that historic defeat. It also helps explain why the book is so compelling: it captures what happens when society’s most oppressed layers see no progressive way out.

The reception has been almost uniformly enthusiastic. The Financial Times called it a cautionary tale for our times; The Times found its parallels with the present surprising. Publishers Weekly praised its insight into a country’s descent into madness. Several reviewers, while admiring, have also admitted that they found its characters hard to like and its outlook bleak.

A warning from 1929

Publishers and critics have presented Berlin Shuffle as a “warning” to our own time. The description is apt, but the warning needs to be made concrete. The novel shows how capitalist crisis grinds people down until resentment, rather than solidarity, becomes the dominant social emotion. It does not show, because history had not yet shown its author, that this outcome was not inevitable.

The parallels today are hard to miss. In February 2025, the far-right Alternative for Germany won 20.8 per cent of the vote, doubling its share and becoming the second-largest party in the Bundestag, while the SPD fell to 16.4 per cent, its worst result ever. Across Europe and in the United States, governments impose austerity on the working class while pouring resources into militarism, and scapegoat migrants and refugees for the consequences.

Boschwitz himself was such a refugee, interned and deported by a British government that saw a German Jew as an enemy alien. He died at 27 in the Atlantic, cutting short exceptional promise.

Berlin Shuffle is not a political novel in the narrow sense, and it offers no answers. But as a document of the social decay that preceded fascism, written by a young man who lived through it, it deserves a wide readership. Philip Boehm’s translation has been widely praised [7][8]. The lesson the novel cannot draw, and that readers today most need to draw for themselves, is that only independent, united working-class political mobilisation can block the road to fascism.

Notes

1. Pushkin Press, Berlin Shuffle, book page (UK hardback, 15 January 2026).
2. Library Journal, review of Berlin Shuffle, November 2025.
3. Publishers Weekly, review of Berlin Shuffle, 17 September 2025.
4. Wikipedia, “Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz”, accessed 24 October 2026.
5. Glenn Nicholls, “Hell or high waters”, Inside Story, 7 April 2018.
6. Shiny New Books, review of The Passenger.
7. Lawrence De Maria, “Berlin Shuffle: A Novel”, Washington Independent Review of Books, 13 January 2026.
8. David Herman, “Berlin Shuffle review: Pimps, prostitutes and peddlers in Weimar Germany”, Jewish Chronicle, 9 January 2026.
9. Jewish Book Council, review of Berlin Shuffle, 8 December 2025.
10. Harvard Book Store, Berlin Shuffle listing, collecting review extracts from the Guardian, Financial Times, The Times and Kirkus Reviews.
11. Wikipedia, “Blutmai”, drawing on Chris Bowlby, “Blutmai 1929: Police, Parties and Proletarians in a Berlin Confrontation,” Historical Journal 29:1 (1986).
12. History Today, “Who Voted for the Nazis?”
13. Leon Trotsky, “The Turn in the Communist International and the Situation in Germany”, 26 September 1930.
14. Leon Trotsky, “What Is National Socialism?”, 10 June 1933; French text, Qu’est-ce que le national-socialisme ?, Marxists Internet Archive. English quotation from the standard Pathfinder translation in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany.
15. Leon Trotsky, “Germany, the Key to the International Situation”, 26 November 1931.
16. The Federal Returning Officer, “2025 Bundestag election: final result”, 14 March 2025; provisional result, 24 February 2025.
17. Ruth Margalit, review of The Passenger, New York Review of Books, 18 November 2021.
18. Cognito, “Depression, Unemployment & Crisis, 1929–32” (summary of standard figures).

Bibliography

Works by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz

• Boschwitz, Ulrich Alexander. Berlin Shuffle. Translated by Philip Boehm. London: Pushkin Press, 2026. ISBN 9781782279143.
• Boschwitz, Ulrich Alexander. Berlin Shuffle: A Novel. Translated by Philip Boehm. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2025. ISBN 9781250869494.
• Boschwitz, Ulrich Alexander. Menschen neben dem Leben. Edited by Peter Graf. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2019.
• Grane, John [Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz]. Människor utanför. Stockholm, 1937.
• Boschwitz, Ulrich Alexander. The Passenger. Translated by Philip Boehm. London: Pushkin Press, 2021; New York: Metropolitan Books, 2021.
• Boschwitz, Ulrich Alexander. Der Reisende. Edited by Peter Graf. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2018.
• Boschwitz, Ulrich Alexander, and Jonathan Freedland. King Winter’s Birthday. Illustrated by Emily Sutton. London: Pushkin Press, 2024.

 

The Passenger: A Jewish businessman's flight across Nazi Germany in November 1938

"Perhaps their idea is to undress us carefully before killing us, so that our clothes won’t be bloodstained and our banknotes ruined. Murder is carried out economically these days."

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz wrote The Passenger at extraordinary speed in the immediate aftermath of the November 1938 pogrom known as Kristallnacht. He was 23 years old, himself an exile from Nazi Germany. The novel appeared in English before the war, first in the United States as The Man Who Took Trains and subsequently in Britain as The Fugitive, before largely disappearing from view. 

Boschwitz did not live to see Nazi Germany's destruction. Interned by the British as an “enemy alien” after the outbreak of war, he was deported to Australia in 1940. After gaining permission to return to Britain in 1942, he boarded the MV Abosso. On 29 October, the ship was torpedoed and sunk by the German submarine U-575. Boschwitz, aged only 27, was among those killed.

The novel itself survived. Boschwitz revised it while interned in Australia, and editors used instructions he left in correspondence with his mother to edit the rediscovered German typescript. Philip Boehm translates the modern English version.

The book's recovery is important. Its significance lies not simply in having been written “at the time”, though that immediacy matters enormously. It records with unusual psychological intensity the experience of an assimilated Jewish businessman discovering, almost from one hour to the next, that the social order in which he has invested his identity, property and confidence has turned against him. That experience is also a political lesson.

A man without a place

The novel opens in Berlin in November 1938. Otto Silbermann is a prosperous Jewish businessman, a First World War veteran and, in his own estimation, a thoroughly respectable German citizen. As the violence of Kristallnacht engulfs the country, Nazi stormtroopers arrive at his home, and Silbermann escapes through the back door. He begins boarding trains, desperately seeking some route out of Germany.

What follows is a kind of nightmare picaresque. Silbermann can neither stay safely where he is nor escape. Public spaces have become dangerous and former relationships uncertain. He therefore travels ceaselessly across Germany. The railway carriage, with its anonymity, constant movement, and temporary suspension between departure and arrival, becomes almost the only place where he can exist.

Boschwitz turns this movement without progress into the novel's organising principle. Silbermann is always going somewhere but never escaping. Each journey offers the possibility of deliverance before returning him to essentially the same situation. The result is a claustrophobia that works all the more effectively because the protagonist spends so much of the novel physically in motion.

The people he encounters form the book's social heart. Nazis, opportunists, functionaries, fellow victims and apparently respectable citizens pass through the railway compartments. Some embrace the regime; others accommodate themselves to it. Silbermann's appearance enables him temporarily to conceal the identity that Nazi racial ideology has made decisive. Contemporary descriptions of the novel emphasise precisely this contradiction: a man who considers himself German and can outwardly “pass” as such discovers that neither patriotism nor appearance provides security. 

The absurdity of the racial categories does not diminish their power. That is part of Boschwitz's point. Backed by state institutions, a fiction becomes a material force governing where Silbermann can sleep, travel, work, and ultimately whether he can continue to exist in his own country.

Property and its illusions

Boschwitz is unsparing toward Silbermann, and this is one of the novel's greatest strengths. Silbermann is not constructed as a conventional heroic figure. He is a prosperous businessman who sees himself as an established member of German society. His wealth, military service, marriage and social standing have encouraged the belief that he somehow occupies a more secure position than Jews who appear more obviously exposed to persecution. The events of November 1938 destroy these assumptions one after another.

Especially important is his relationship with Becker, his non-Jewish business associate and former wartime comrade. The relationship demonstrates how political persecution creates opportunities for private enrichment. Personal loyalty, commercial partnership, and patriotic comradeship therefore prove far weaker than the new realities the regime creates.

Here Boschwitz touches on one of the darkest features of the persecution of German Jews: dispossession occurs not simply through spectacular public violence but through ordinary economic relationships. The destruction of legal and social protection produces beneficiaries. People who yesterday dealt with Jewish neighbours as business partners or customers discover opportunities in their vulnerability.

Silbermann's attachment to the money he carries therefore takes on greater symbolic importance. It is the portable remnant of his former existence. He has spent his adult life in a society that supposedly confers independence and social status through property. Now he discovers that possession without enforceable rights provides remarkably little protection.

This is what gives the novel's treatment of bourgeois respectability its particular force. Silbermann has trusted the categories through which established society understood itself: property, citizenship, military service, respectable marriage, commerce and obedience to law. Under fascism these protections collapse because the state itself has become the instrument of persecution.

His journey therefore records more than the destruction of an individual. It dramatises the destruction of an illusion: that accumulated property and social respectability can provide security independently of the political and social order upon which property rights themselves depend. 

Big business, fascism and the defeat of the working class

The catastrophe that overtakes Silbermann cannot be understood solely through the history of antisemitism. It unfolded within the crisis of German capitalism and after the destruction of a workers' movement that had once constituted the most formidable organised social opposition to the German right.

The relationship between Adolf Hitler and German big business before 1933 has been the subject of an extensive historiographical dispute. The crude proposition that German industrialists acted as a single bloc, financed the Nazi movement from its inception and appointed Hitler as their instrument does not withstand scrutiny. Henry Ashby Turner Jr., one of the historians most closely associated with challenging this interpretation, emphasised both the unevenness of business support and the problems with some of the evidence traditionally used to demonstrate extensive industrial financing of the Nazis before they assumed power. [jstor.org]

But rejecting a conspiracy theory of Hitler's rise is not the same thing as denying the profound convergence that developed between important sections of German capital and the Nazi dictatorship. By February 1933, after Hitler had already become chancellor, leading industrialists met Hitler and Hermann Göring at a gathering intended to raise money for the Nazi election campaign. Under the Third Reich, major German businesses would subsequently participate in and profit from forced labour, the “Aryanisation” of Jewish businesses and the exploitation of occupied Europe.

More immediately, the new regime moved quickly against working-class organisations. Following the Reichstag fire, the government used emergency powers to suspend fundamental civil liberties and incarcerate political opponents. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum records that the regime rapidly dismantled democratic freedoms and transformed Germany into a dictatorship. The regime destroyed independent trade unionism almost immediately. On 2 May 1933, SA detachments occupied union offices throughout Germany and forced the unions to dissolve. Union buildings and records were seized, leaders were attacked or imprisoned, and the Nazi-controlled German Labour Front replaced the independent organisations of labour.

This sequence is fundamentally significant. National Socialism did not merely persecute Jews while leaving the existing configuration of class organisations intact. Consolidating power required destroying the institutions through which millions of German workers had previously organised politically and industrially. Communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists and other political opponents were among the early targets of Nazi repression.

From a Marxist standpoint, this relationship between capitalist crisis, political reaction, and the smashing of working-class organisation is indispensable to understanding fascism. It also supplies a social background that necessarily lies outside Silbermann's immediate field of vision. His tragedy takes place after a historic political defeat.

That fact gives meaning to Boschwitz's focus on businesspeople, officials, and frightened middle-class members. Silbermann searches desperately for individual protection because the collective social and political forces that might have opposed the regime have already been crushed. By November 1938, the possibility of answering Nazi violence through the powerful mass organisations that had characterised working-class life during the Weimar Republic has been eliminated.

The historical irony is devastating. Silbermann has trusted precisely those institutions of bourgeois society that now offer him no defence: property, law, respectable commerce, military service and citizenship. His former business associate can exploit his vulnerability because persecution has altered the balance of power between them. The state no longer stands above their commercial relationship as the impartial guarantor Silbermann once imagined.

His endless railway journey therefore carries a deeper social meaning. Silbermann's individual security is destroyed in a society where the organised power of the working class has already been broken, and significant sections of economic privilege have accommodated themselves to, collaborated with, or benefited from the new dictatorship. That does not mean that every capitalist supported Hitler or that Nazism can be explained as nothing more than a conspiracy of industrialists. The historical record is considerably more complex. It does mean that the persecution portrayed by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz developed within a dictatorship whose consolidation entailed both the destruction of organised labour and, subsequently, extensive collaboration with German industry.

That broader historical framework makes The Passenger still more devastating. Boschwitz shows the catastrophe through the consciousness of one frightened bourgeois individual. History shows the social defeats that made his isolation possible.

Fascism and the “democracies”

Silbermann is certainly alienated, frightened and increasingly disoriented, but he has not accidentally wandered into a meaningless Kafkaesque universe. He has been placed in an historically specific situation. The Nazi state has deprived Jews of elementary rights and unleashed organised persecution against them.

In his discussion of the novel, André Aciman stresses the terrifying position of someone trapped as Germany becomes impossible to inhabit. At the same time, other countries refuse to admit him. His account describes a Germany where Silbermann discovers that escape has become effectively impossible: “Germany won't let you out, and other countries don't want to let you in.”

The international dimension is crucial. Persecution creates the refugee, but borders can transform persecution into entrapment. Silbermann becomes a man who desperately needs to leave one territory without a guaranteed right to enter another.

Boschwitz understood that condition personally. His family left Germany after the Nuremberg Laws in 1935. He subsequently lived outside Germany before reaching Britain in 1939, where the war transformed him from a refugee from Hitler into an “enemy alien” in the eyes of the British authorities. He was ultimately transported to Australia.

This is a bitter historical irony. A young German writer driven into exile by the Nazi regime was interned by the country in which he had sought refuge and transported halfway around the world, only to die aboard the ship carrying him back.

Strengths and limitations

As fiction, The Passenger has the strengths and some weaknesses of a novel written with extraordinary urgency. Boschwitz reportedly produced it in approximately four weeks after Kristallnacht. That urgency survives in the work's construction. Its movement is rapid and anxious, its recurring trains reproducing Silbermann's inability to find safety or repose.

The railway compartment is Boschwitz's most effective artistic device. It brings Silbermann into temporary proximity with strangers whose political attitudes he must continually assess while concealing the fact upon which his survival now depends. Conversation becomes dangerous because the most banal exchange can expose him.

This also explains the recurrence of similar situations. Structurally, the novel can feel repetitive, but the repetition has an artistic function. Silbermann cannot escape the same fundamental problem. Each departure promises a geographical solution to what is ultimately a political catastrophe.

The novel's perspective nevertheless has limits. Its central social world is that of businesspeople and middle-class members. The reader experiences fascism principally through a bourgeois Jewish protagonist whose assumptions about citizenship, property and assimilation are being violently demolished.

That restriction is historically revealing in itself. Silbermann understands that his former life has ceased to exist long before he can adequately explain why it has disappeared. Boschwitz therefore captures, with remarkable immediacy, the consciousness of a man experiencing a historical catastrophe faster than he can comprehend.

André Aciman's preface emphasises the novel's psychological and sociological power, describing it as both an account of Jewish existence immediately before the war and an extraordinarily penetrating portrait of its protagonist. That emphasis is valuable, provided Silbermann's specific circumstances don't dissolve into a timeless parable of displacement. Silbermann is not simply modern man lost in an absurd universe. He is a Jewish citizen being destroyed by a definite political regime.

A book to read

The Passenger deserves the wide readership its rediscovery has brought it. Its revived edition achieved substantial international success, including translation into more than 20 languages. Yet its importance ultimately has little to do with the remarkable history of its disappearance and recovery.

Its enduring power comes from the immediacy with which Boschwitz captures the moment when ordinary social existence becomes impossible. Silbermann begins with many of the assumptions of the respectable bourgeois citizen. He possesses property, has served his country, conducts business and regards himself as thoroughly German. He discovers that none of these things protects him once political power decides he no longer belongs.

The horror of The Passenger lies in the incremental character of this discovery. Silbermann has no secure place from which to stand outside events and comprehend them as a whole. Instead, he passes from train to train, conversation to conversation, and humiliation to humiliation, still trying to behave according to the rules of a society whose rules have ceased to protect him.

That gives Boschwitz's novel a significance beyond its considerable documentary value. Written by a 23-year-old refugee before the full catastrophe of European Jewry had unfolded, it records the atmosphere of persecution with an immediacy unavailable to retrospective historical fiction. Boschwitz did not know what would follow. He did understand that a decisive boundary had already been crossed.

His protagonist's movement across Germany therefore becomes an image of terrifying simplicity: a man remains physically inside the country he regards as his own while discovering that, politically and socially, there is no longer any place in it where he is permitted to belong. That is what makes The Passenger so disturbing. That is why it remains a book worth reading.

 

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[1] The Passenger, by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, translated by Philip Boehm, with an introduction by André Aciman (Pushkin Press Classics)

 

Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks in a new translation: the decline of a family, the fate of a class

 
A new English version of Thomas Mann's first great novel arrives as the social order it anatomised once again shows every sign of exhaustion. The book deserves the widest possible readership, not as a period piece about a vanished merchant patriciate, but as a work that grasped, more profoundly than its author fully understood, the historical fate of a class.

Oxford University Press has published a new translation of The Buddenbrooks in its World's Classics series, by veteran translator Mike Mitchell, with an introduction, chronology, and explanatory notes by Ritchie Robertson, formerly Schwarz-Taylor Professor of German at Oxford. The edition runs to 656 pages. Mitchell taught at the universities of Reading and Stirling before becoming a full-time literary translator. Robertson retired in 2021 as Schwarz-Taylor Professor and is now an Emeritus Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford.

A fresh, carefully annotated edition is welcome because Buddenbrooks holds a distinctive place in European literature. Mann began writing the novel in 1897, when he was 22, and completed it in 1900; it was published the following year. Drawing deeply on his family's history and the commercial society of Lübeck where he grew up, he transformed autobiographical material into a panoramic account of the dissolution of an entire social world. When he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, the Academy's citation singled out his “great novel Buddenbrooks”.

What makes the novel enduring is precisely the distance separating the scale of its ostensible subject from that of its real achievement. The title promises a family history, and Mann certainly supplies one in extraordinary detail: marriages and divorces, births and deaths, business transactions and inheritances, illnesses, meals, houses, clothes, religious observances, musical enthusiasms and the minute rituals by which established families reassure themselves of their permanence. Yet behind this accumulation of apparently private incidents another history steadily makes itself felt.

The Buddenbrooks' tragedy takes place during the transformation of nineteenth-century German society. The novel follows four generations of a wealthy North German merchant family between 1835 and 1877, a period encompassing enormous economic, social and political change. The family fortune, its commercial reputation, and civic standing initially seem almost natural. Business, family and public authority reinforce one another. Yet what one generation experiences as permanence becomes an increasingly burdensome inheritance for another.

This is where Buddenbrooks becomes considerably more than a chronicle of familial decadence. Arthur Schopenhauer profoundly influenced Mann, and the novel's treatment of exhaustion, death and individual release bears the unmistakable imprint of that encounter. Oxford University Press describes decline in the novel as a “psychological process”, in which growing artistic sensitivity weakens the ruthless commercial instincts tied to the family's earlier prosperity.

But the novel's greatness lies partly in its realism, which goes beyond this explanation. What Mann interprets philosophically as exhaustion and degeneration also emerges objectively as historical transformation. The Buddenbrooks have not simply grown too sensitive for business. The world that made their particular form of bourgeois authority possible is itself changing around them. Their inner disintegration reflects an external movement they cannot comprehend or control.

Few novels depict, with comparable force, how a ruling social layer experiences historical decline as personal misfortune. The erosion of social confidence appears first not in political programmes or economic statistics but in marriages, nervous illnesses, failed commercial ventures, aesthetic longings and doubts about the future. This contradiction between Mann's philosophical conception of decline and the richer conclusions his own realism forces on him gives Buddenbrooks its lasting significance. He set out to describe a family's decline. In doing so, he produced something far greater: the artistic anatomy of a social world passing away.

Four generations

The novel, whose German subtitle, Verfall einer Familie, means “Decline of a Family”, opens in 1835 with a housewarming dinner in a grand house on Mengstrasse. Old Johann Buddenbrook, a prosperous grain merchant with the rationalism and robust self-confidence of the Enlightenment bourgeoisie, has bought the property from a bankrupt rival. It closes in 1877 in an altogether different world: the house has been sold, the firm liquidated, the male line extinguished, and what remains of the family reduced largely to a circle of grieving women. Across these four generations Mann charts not simply the disappearance of a dynasty, but the gradual erosion of the material security and moral certainty upon which its authority rests.

Each generation inherits its predecessor's achievements but proves progressively less capable of inhabiting the social role that comes with them. In the patriarch Johann, business appears natural and uncomplicated. Commerce is his element, prosperity the confirmation of rational calculation and worldly competence. His son, the Consul, retains the commercial ethic but overlays it with a distinctly different sensibility. Pietism enters a world previously dominated by Enlightenment common sense. The family chronicle records business calculations, births, marriages, and deaths and commends them to God. The firm is no longer merely an enterprise. It has become a moral obligation, an inheritance whose preservation increasingly assumes the character of a duty.

With the Consul's children this contradiction becomes sharper.  Antonie internalises the family's conception of itself perhaps more completely than anyone. Her personal happiness is repeatedly subordinated to the name and the firm's commercial interests. The firm encourages her to marry Grünlich because it seems advantageous. When he proves to be a fortune-hunter and goes bankrupt, the collapse brutally exposes the economic considerations underlying the supposedly private institution of marriage. Antonie's second marriage, to the Munich hop merchant Permaneder, likewise fails. Yet she remains devoted to the Buddenbrook name, clinging with almost comic determination to the prestige of a family whose material foundations are steadily weakening.

Christian represents another form of dissolution. Unable to accept the discipline expected of a Buddenbrook, he drifts through business, theatre, clubs, and hypochondria. Christian largely refuses what Thomas experiences as an unbearable duty. The brothers therefore respond in opposite ways to the same inheritance.

Thomas attempts to preserve it through sheer force of personality. He assumes control of the firm, enters public life, and becomes a senator, seemingly embodying the family's continued success. Yet the more precarious his confidence becomes, the more meticulously he performs the outward signs of bourgeois authority. Dress, manners, public bearing and commercial reputation acquire enormous importance precisely because the inner certainty that once sustained them is disappearing. What came naturally to Johann must consciously be acted by Thomas.

With Thomas's son Hanno, even the performance becomes impossible. Frail, introspective and artistically gifted, he feels no vocation for commerce and finds his deepest emotional refuge in music. The qualities earlier generations regarded as incidental to existence have moved to its centre. The family has moved from Johann's uncomplicated identification with commerce to Hanno's near-total estrangement from it.

Mann gives this historical and psychological trajectory its most economical expression in the family book. Hanno draws a double line beneath his own name. When asked why, he explains that he thought nothing more would come.

The gesture is innocent, but its significance is devastating. A succession that has organised four generations' lives stops. The child, meant to guarantee the family's future, instinctively recognises that there is none. The line beneath his name becomes a line beneath the Buddenbrooks themselves.

A family and a class

The years the novel spans, 1835 to 1877, saw German capitalism shift from the fragmented commercial world of the post-Napoleonic states to the unified, rapidly industrialising empire proclaimed in 1871.

The Buddenbrooks belong to the old Hanseatic patriciate: merchants whose economic status is inseparable from civic office, inherited reputation and a code of honour in which the firm appears almost as a sacred trust handed from father to son. Family, property, business and public standing are different aspects of a single social existence.

Their rivals, the Hagenströms, represent something new. Coarser in Mann's presentation, less burdened by inherited tradition and altogether less embarrassed by speculation, they rise as the Buddenbrooks sink, and it is Hagenström who finally acquires the house on Mengstrasse. Mann treats them with undisguised distaste, but the logic of his own novel shows that their victory is not simply a matter of superior or inferior character. The competition between the two families expresses, within the narrow confines of a provincial mercantile city, the displacement of one historical form of bourgeois life by another.

The book's handling of 1848 is especially revealing. When a crowd of workers gathers outside the building where the city's assembly sits during the revolutionary upheavals, the Consul goes out to address them. The worker Carl Smolt, asked what the crowd wants, replies that they want a republic. Told that Lübeck already possesses one, he answers that in that case they want another.

The scene reads largely as comedy, and the crowd eventually disperses, yet beneath the patricians' condescension Mann registers something more serious: the masses' momentary intrusion into a political world that had long regarded government as its natural possession. The Consul's aristocratic father-in-law, Lebrecht Kröger, dies that same evening, almost as though the lower orders' appearance on the stage of history has proved fatal to him.

Friedrich Engels famously praised Honoré de Balzac because the royalist novelist's realism compelled him to portray the aristocracy's historical decline, for which he nevertheless felt considerable sympathy. Something similar can be said of the young Mann. He possessed no sympathy for socialism, and his attachment to the old Lübeck patriciate was profound. Yet his artistic honesty compelled him to portray the decline of his own social world with a truthfulness that repeatedly cuts across his nostalgia.

The Hungarian Marxist critic Georg Lukács, who wrote extensively about Mann, recognised the broader importance of this achievement. Buddenbrooks endures not simply as a record of a dying family's peculiarities, but because Mann, in the tradition of the greatest bourgeois realism, embodies historical processes in fully realised individual lives. The historical movement is never imposed upon the characters from outside. It emerges through their marriages, inheritances, illnesses, commercial decisions, aspirations and disappointments. The Buddenbrooks' decline is therefore simultaneously private and social.

For Lukács, realism's greatness lay precisely in its capacity to penetrate immediate appearances and disclose the forces shaping individual existence. The greatest writers could consequently reveal truths that exceeded, and sometimes contradicted, their own consciously held political or philosophical opinions. Balzac remained Lukács's classical example: a political conservative whose fidelity to social reality produced an extraordinarily penetrating picture of bourgeois society. Something comparable occurs in Mann. His philosophical categories emphasise degeneration, nervous exhaustion and the conflict between artistic sensitivity and practical life, yet the social world he creates refuses to remain confined within them.

Johann, Tony, Thomas and Hanno are not merely stages in a biological process of family decay. Each expresses a different relationship to a changing bourgeois order. What appears secure and natural to Johann becomes a duty that demands enormous self-discipline from Thomas and, finally, becomes impossible for Hanno. The changing personalities of the Buddenbrooks thus register a historical transformation.

This is why Mann's realism is more powerful than any simple theory of hereditary degeneration. He does not merely tell the reader that a class is declining. He lets that decline be experienced from within, as inherited certainties cease to match social reality. The family drama thereby acquires historical significance: the fate of the Buddenbrooks becomes inseparable from the fate of the world that produced them.

Decline turned inward

Mann's own theoretical explanation of the family's collapse lies elsewhere. Under the powerful influence of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche and contemporary ideas of degeneration, he presents decline partly as a biological and psychological process. Schopenhauer's influence on the young Mann and the novel's conception of decadence is well established.

With each generation, the Buddenbrooks become more nervous, reflective, and aesthetically sensitive, and apparently less capable of the ruthless commercial activity on which the family fortune was built. In this scheme, sensibility and art become symptoms of a life force running down.

Thomas Buddenbrook is the central figure in this process, and Mann's portrait of him is one of the novel's greatest achievements. He holds himself together increasingly by force of will, changing his clothes several times a day and maintaining the elaborate appearance of bourgeois respectability, even as the inner conviction that once sustained his class slowly drains away.

A disastrous speculation on a harvest bought before it is gathered and later destroyed marks the moment Thomas tries to act according to more aggressive commercial principles and fails. Increasingly, the confidence required by the role he performs becomes impossible to sustain.

In one of the novel's most celebrated episodes, Thomas encounters Schopenhauer and experiences a brief and intoxicating philosophical liberation from his own frightened individuality. Mann later acknowledged how profoundly his personal encounter with Schopenhauer informed the episode. Yet Thomas soon returns to the routines of existence from which philosophy has only momentarily released him. He eventually collapses after leaving the dentist and dies.

Hanno's world, meanwhile, is music, above all Wagner's. Mann's account of the boy's piano improvisations, and the extraordinary chapter devoted to a single day in his grim, authoritarian school, belong among the novel's finest passages. The institutional world into which the sensitive child is forced seems increasingly incapable of producing anything but conformity, fear, and submission.

Yet Mann's limited outlook also becomes evident here. Interpreting the decline of a social class primarily as a fatal opposition between “life” and “spirit”, between commercial vitality and artistic sensitivity, translates an objective social and historical development into the language of psychology and metaphysics.

Significantly, Oxford's description of the new edition itself identifies the novel's concern with decline “as a psychological process” in which artistic sensibility weakens the business instincts responsible for the family's prosperity. It is certainly a psychological process. But it is not only that. The Buddenbrooks are not destroyed because successive generations become excessively sensitive. Their psychological transformation takes place within a changing social world. The conditions that had sustained the authority of a patriciate of merchant-senators are themselves being transformed by the development of capitalism.

The contradiction is essential to the novel's greatness. Mann's philosophy tends to mystify what his realism reveals. “Decline” enters his characters' consciousness as fatigue, illness, aestheticism, and loss of will; in the novel's objective movement it takes another form: the disappearance of the economic and social conditions on which Buddenbrook authority rested.

Their tragedy therefore cannot be reduced either to biology or to economics. Its artistic power arises precisely because Mann makes the intimate life of the bourgeois family the medium through which historical change becomes emotionally perceptible. Marriage, illness, inheritance, sexuality, childhood, business and art become forms through which an entire social layer experiences, without completely understanding, the erosion of its historical confidence. Thomas Buddenbrook's inward crisis is therefore the subjective reflection of an objective transformation. Mann's genius as a realist lets the reader perceive this even when his philosophical assumptions point elsewhere.

The new edition

English-language readers have chiefly encountered Mann's novel through two earlier translations: H. T. Lowe-Porter's version, first published in 1924, and John E. Woods's later translation. Mitchell therefore enters a field in which the novel already possesses a substantial English-language history.

He comes well equipped. Mike Mitchell taught at the universities of Reading and Stirling before becoming a full-time translator and has translated more than 100 works of fiction and non-fiction from German and French. His translation of Herbert Rosendorfer's Letters Back from Ancient China received the Schlegel-Tieck Prize in 1998.

The decision to call the novel The Buddenbrooks, rather than the now-familiar Buddenbrooks, gives the English title a slightly different cadence, natural enough in English, if at the expense of some of the stark, almost ledger-like quality of the German family name standing alone.

One particularly intriguing feature is the inclusion of an “Appendix: Permaneder in Standard English”. Permaneder's Bavarian speech, incomprehensible and comic to the Lübeck family, serves an important artistic purpose because language throughout the novel marks differences of region, class and generation. The inclusion of a standard-English appendix at least indicates that this translation values preserving that linguistic distance, rather than letting the social distinctions embedded in Mann's dialogue disappear.

Ritchie Robertson, meanwhile, is exceptionally well placed to provide the supporting scholarly material. He retired in 2021 as Schwarz-Taylor Professor of German at the University of Oxford and is an Emeritus Fellow of Queen's College. His publications span Kafka, Goethe, the Enlightenment, and German political tragedy.

The edition includes an introduction, a note on the translation, a select bibliography, a chronology, the Permaneder appendix, and explanatory notes. Such annotation is particularly useful for a novel whose texture depends so heavily upon the institutions, religious assumptions, linguistic peculiarities and commercial practices of nineteenth-century North German society.

From Lübeck to exile

The contradictions visible in Buddenbrooks would take increasingly political form in Mann's later work. During the First World War he wrote Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, defending a conception of German “culture” against Western liberal “civilisation”. During the subsequent crisis of German society, his position changed profoundly. Confronted with the upheavals that followed the First World War and, eventually, the rise of fascism, Mann moved toward defending parliamentary democracy and opposing Nazism.

The old merchant patriciate Mann chronicled belonged to an earlier stage in the development of German capitalism. Its world cannot simply be identified with the vastly more powerful industrial and financial interests of twentieth-century Germany. But the historical development connecting the two forms part of the larger story Mann had inadvertently begun to tell: the transformation of the German bourgeoisie from the locally rooted mercantile order represented by the Buddenbrooks into the industrial capitalist society of the unified Reich and, eventually, into the monopoly capitalism thrown into catastrophic political crisis during the Weimar Republic.

Forced into exile after the Nazi seizure of power, Mann became an increasingly outspoken opponent of Hitler. The political trajectory from cultural conservative to defender of democratic and humanist values was shaped by the convulsions of the bourgeois order whose contradictions his first great novel had already begun to register.

A novel for the present

Read today, Buddenbrooks speaks with renewed force. Mann's social world has disappeared. Today's financial oligarchy is separated from the nineteenth-century merchant patriciate by immense transformations in productive forces, corporate organisation, finance and the world market. But the social relations underlying inheritance, private wealth, competition and the accumulation of property have not disappeared.

Perhaps this is why the psychology of Mann's characters remains so recognisable. Private wealth presents itself as solidity, permanence, merit, and family achievement, even as economic processes continually transform its social foundations, processes its individual beneficiaries neither control nor fully understand. Thomas Buddenbrook believes that he is defending something permanent. In reality, everything around him is changing. The novel's final pages provide no way forward. Mann could see decline but not the social force capable of overcoming the order to which his characters belonged. The working class consequently appears only fleetingly, most memorably in the episode of 1848.

The contemporary reader need not share that historical limitation. The value of Buddenbrooks lies precisely in Mann's uncompromising portrayal of a social order that has begun to lose confidence in its own permanence, an exhaustion embodied in the conviction, quoted by Oxford from Mitchell's translation, that “all this could not last much longer”.

Mann could depict the exhaustion of a class but not the social force capable of transcending the order to which it belonged. More than a century later, that historical limitation does not diminish the novel's achievement. It helps define it. Buddenbrooks remains extraordinarily alive because Mann's realism penetrated beyond his own philosophical explanations to reveal how a social order experiences the erosion of its historical confidence in the most intimate realms of human existence: marriage, inheritance, childhood, illness, ambition, art and death.

That contradiction is ultimately responsible for the novel's enduring power. Mann understood the Buddenbrooks' decline through Schopenhauer, decadence and the supposedly antagonistic claims of life and art. But the work he actually created goes far beyond those categories. The novelist sees more than the philosopher. Mann's metaphysics describes the family's fate as degeneration; Mann's realism reveals history.

This new edition is therefore a welcome addition. Mike Mitchell's translation gives another generation of English-language readers a chance to encounter one of the great European novels of the bourgeois age. At the same time, Ritchie Robertson's accompanying scholarly material situates the work in the intellectual and cultural world from which it emerged. Readers coming to the Buddenbrooks for the first time have an attractive new point of entry. Those who already know the family through earlier translations have ample reason to return.

Select bibliography

Primary texts

Mann, Thomas. The Buddenbrooks. Translated by Mike Mitchell. Edited with an introduction and notes by Ritchie Robertson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2026. 656 pp.

Mann, Thomas. Buddenbrooks. Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1924.

Mann, Thomas. Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man. Translated by Walter D. Morris. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983.

Mann, Thomas. Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend. Translated by John E. Woods. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. 2 vols. Translated and edited by Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman and Christopher Janaway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Thomas Mann and Buddenbrooks

Bahr, Ehrhard, ed. A Companion to the Works of Thomas Mann. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. It contains a substantial chapter by Herbert Lehnert on Mann's beginnings and Buddenbrooks. [cambridge.org]

Hayman, Ronald. Thomas Mann: A Biography. London: Bloomsbury, 1995.

Kurzke, Hermann. Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art: A Biography. Translated by Leslie Willson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Ridley, Hugh. The Problematic Bourgeois: Twentieth-Century Criticism on Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1994. Particularly useful for the critical history surrounding the novel and the problem of the bourgeoisie in Mann's work. [archive.org], [thefreelibrary.com]

Robertson, Ritchie. The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Realism, bourgeois society and Marxist criticism

Engels, Friedrich. Letter to Margaret Harkness, April 1888. In Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 48. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2001.

Lukács, Georg. Essays on Thomas Mann. Translated by Stanley Mitchell. London: Merlin Press, 1964.

Lukács, Georg. The Historical Novel. Translated by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. London: Merlin Press, 1962.

Lukács, Georg. Studies in European Realism. London: Hillway Publishing, 1950.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. 1848.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. London: Penguin/New Left Review, 1976.

German history and the bourgeoisie

Blackbourn, David. The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780–1918. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Blackbourn, David, and Geoff Eley. The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Evans, Richard J. The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815–1914. London: Allen Lane, 2016.

Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. The German Empire, 1871–1918. Translated by Kim Traynor. Leamington Spa: Berg, 1985.

Editorial rationale

This bibliography keeps the new Mitchell edition at the centre, while Lukács, Marx and Engels provide the theoretical basis for your discussion of realism, class and historical transformation. Ridley and the broader Mann scholarship cover the literary-critical debate, while Blackbourn, Eley and Wehler supply the historical background to the transformation of the German bourgeoisie.

 

A history of the fight against antisemitism—and the politics it leaves out

The struggle against antisemitism is a question of burning political importance. Across Europe, parties descended from or modelled on fascism are in government or on the threshold. In Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland polls as a major party. In Britain, far-right street mobilisations draw crowds unseen since the 1930s, while Reform UK sets the agenda in official politics.

At the same time, the charge of antisemitism has been turned into an instrument of state repression. It is wielded not against the heirs of Hitler and Mosley but against workers, students and Jewish opponents of Israel's onslaught on Gaza. Any serious history of the fight against antisemitism must therefore answer definite questions. Who fought it? With what methods? On what class basis? And with what results?

This collection of essays, published by the Wiener Holocaust Library, poses the right question in its title. Its answers, however, are shaped by its producers' institutional and political commitments.[1]

The book and its sponsors

The volume grew out of the Library's exhibition Fighting Antisemitism from Dreyfus to Today, shown in London from March to September 2022 and later taken to Parliament. Barbara Warnock, the Library's senior curator, and Toby Simpson, its director, edited it, and it launched in November 2022.

Its essays trace the individuals and organisations that have countered antisemitism since the Dreyfus Affair. They cover the campaign to free Dreyfus, Alfred Wiener's anti-Nazi work in Germany and the Netherlands, the 43 Group's post-war anti-fascist direct action, and the Library's own monitoring work. A final section examines what the publisher calls the differing forms of antisemitism in Britain in recent decades.

The Wiener Library deserves credit. Founded by Wiener in Amsterdam in 1933 and moved to London in 1939, its archive is an irreplaceable record of the Nazi regime and its crimes. The exhibition catalogue drew on photographs from the Community Security Trust (CST) archives and credited the CST's head of policy, Dave Rich, among others.

That partnership, and the choice of foreword writer, signal where the book will land. Julia Neuberger, senior rabbi of West London Synagogue and a crossbench peer, was among the most prominent establishment voices in the campaign against Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party. That is the political lens through which a century of history is ultimately read.

Dreyfus: the decisive role of the socialist movement

The book rightly opens with the Dreyfus Affair. In 1894, a Jewish artillery officer was framed for espionage by the French General Staff and shipped to Devil's Island. The affair became the axis around which the Third Republic's political forces polarised: the army, the Catholic Church, and Édouard Drumont's antisemitic leagues on one side; republicans, intellectuals, and, decisively, the socialist workers' movement on the other.

Appeals to the authorities' good faith did not free Dreyfus. Zola's J'accuse in January 1898 was an act of political war on the military caste. The turning point came when Jean Jaurès overcame the Guesdist wing of French socialism, which had dismissed the case as a quarrel between bourgeois factions, and brought the organised working class into the fight against clerical-militarist reaction.

This is the period's first lesson, and it is the one a history organised around "methods" of countering antisemitism tends to blur. Antisemitism in France was the banner of a social coalition seeking to overturn the republic and crush the workers' movement. The working class pushed it back by intervening as an independent force.

Weimar: the limits of rebuttal

Alfred Wiener, the Library's founder, stands at the centre of the story. A decorated veteran of the First World War, Wiener worked for the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith (Centralverein). He monitored the Nazi press, exposed its forgeries and published counter-propaganda. Around 1930, the Büro Wilhelmstrasse issued Anti-Anti, a handbook of facts for those responding to antisemitic lies.

The courage and diligence of this work are unquestioned. But its strategy rested on the assumption that Nazism could be defeated by information, by the law and by the institutions of the Weimar Republic. Every one of those props gave way. The Nazis were not a misunderstanding to be corrected with better facts. Amid economic collapse, German finance capital and the Junker landowners chose them as the instrument to smash Europe's most powerful workers' movement.

United action by Social Democratic and Communist workers offered the only realistic means of stopping Hitler’s advance. But both sides sabotaged such unity: the SPD leadership subordinated the working class to the bourgeois state and its institutions, and the Stalinist line denounced Social Democracy as “social fascism” and rejected a genuine united front. From exile, Leon Trotsky repeatedly warned of the catastrophic consequences of this political paralysis and fought to mobilise the working class in a united front against fascism. Hitler did not conquer power through an irresistible popular mandate in January 1933. Hindenburg installed him as chancellor, backed by powerful sections of Germany’s ruling elite.

A history of anti-antisemitism that does not place this betrayal at the centre cannot explain why the Centralverein's devoted labours ended in catastrophe. The Library's archive of rebuttal pamphlets is, in the end, a monument to the limits of enlightenment in the face of a social crisis.

Britain: Cable Street and the 43 Group

The British chapters tell a story whose lessons point in the same direction. On 4 October 1936, tens of thousands of East End workers—Jewish garment workers, Irish dockers, Communist and Independent Labour Party members—blocked Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts at Cable Street. The police, who had been sent to clear a path for the fascists, were driven back.

Anglo-Jewry's official leadership played no part in this victory. The Board of Deputies and the Jewish Chronicle urged Jews to stay away and leave matters to the authorities. The Communist Party leadership had first planned to send its members to a solidarity rally elsewhere in Spain, and changed course only under pressure from the ranks.

The same pattern recurred after 1945. When Mosley sought to revive his movement, Jewish veterans formed the 43 Group. They broke up fascist meetings, infiltrated fascist organisations and fought them in the streets, again over the objections of the community establishment, which preferred quiet lobbying of the state.

The volume's attention to the 43 Group is welcome. Their lesson, however, is not about the merits of "direct action" as a technique. It is that fascism was confronted successfully only when working people mobilised independently of—and often against—the police, the courts, and the official leaderships who counselled reliance on them.

Recent decades: Neuberger and the campaign against Corbyn

When the book reaches contemporary Britain, the gap between its historical material and its politics becomes a chasm. The "differing forms of antisemitism" of recent decades are, above all, the terrain of the campaign waged between 2015 and 2020 against Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party.

Neuberger was a leading figure in that campaign. In 2016 she told Newsnight that Labour had a "very particular problem" with antisemitism on the hard left. In June 2018 she urged Jews to resign from the party and said she hoped the issue would stop Labour from being elected. Her 2019 book stopped short of calling Corbyn an antisemite but said he had "behaved like an antisemite". In the 2019 election, she endorsed the Chief Rabbi's unprecedented intervention against him.

Her central criterion is that criticism of Israel becomes antisemitic when its tone would not be used of other countries. This tests subjective impression, not objective content. It mirrors the logic of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) "working definition", whose Israel-related examples Labour was forced to adopt in full in 2018 after a campaign in which the three main Jewish newspapers ran an identical front page against Corbyn.

The campaign was political. The Labour right, the Conservative press and the Israeli state set out to destroy a leader who, whatever his limitations, had attracted hundreds of thousands of young people with left-wing rhetoric. Corbyn's own response was capitulation: he accepted the IHRA definition, suspended allies and offered apology after apology. The 2022 Forde Report, commissioned by Labour itself, found that the antisemitism issue had been used as a factional weapon. None of this alters the existence of real antisemitism, which socialists oppose without compromise. But a history that presents this episode as a chapter in the fight against racism adopts the state's vantage point.

After 2022: Gaza and the weaponisation of antisemitism

The book closes in 2022. Events since October 2023 have exposed the consequences of the political framework it endorses. Israel's assault on Gaza, which the International Court of Justice found in January 2024 raised plausible claims under the Genocide Convention, has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and reduced the territory to rubble.

Throughout, governments in Britain and Europe have used the equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism to criminalise opposition. Mass demonstrations in London, in which Jewish contingents marched prominently, were branded "hate marches" by a Conservative home secretary. The Starmer government proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation in July 2025, and hundreds of people, many of them pensioners, were arrested for holding placards. In Germany, appeals to Israel's security as a reason of state have been used to ban protests and cancel Jewish and Palestinian speakers.

The effect is doubly reactionary. It shields a state committing mass atrocities by identifying all Jews with its crimes, the very conflation that real antisemites exploit. And it diverts attention from the genuine and growing danger posed by the far right, which combines hostility to Muslims and migrants with the old conspiracy theories about Jews and finds a friendly hearing in official politics.

Conclusion: the lessons the book does not draw

Read against the grain, the material this volume assembles supports conclusions very different from those of its sponsors. Modern antisemitism has never been simply an irrational prejudice to be corrected by education and monitoring. It has been a tool of reaction, mobilised during periods of capitalist crisis to divert social anger from the ruling class onto a scapegoat and to split the working class.

The working class, Jewish and non-Jewish, has beaten it back only when it intervened independently: in the Dreyfusard movement, on the barricades of Cable Street, and in the streets against Mosley after the war. Where reliance fell on the state, the courts, and bourgeois liberalism, as in Weimar Germany, the outcome was catastrophe. Trotsky, writing in 1938, warned that the further advance of world reaction would bring the physical extermination of the Jews. He insisted that only the socialist transformation of society could secure their future.

The Zionist project offered a different answer: a nation-state built on the dispossession of another people. That answer has produced a state now carrying out atrocities in the name of Jews everywhere, which in turn feeds the antisemitism it claims to combat.

The Wiener Library archives will remain an indispensable resource. But the fight against antisemitism today requires a political perspective this book does not provide. That perspective is the international unity of the working class against capitalism, war and every form of racism, including the racism directed against Palestinians.

Sources

• Wiener Holocaust Library: book listing
• Wiener Holocaust Library: book launch event
• Wiener Holocaust Library: exhibition catalogue
• Online exhibition: Fighting Antisemitism
• Jewish Chronicle, 2016: Neuberger on Labour
• Jewish Chronicle, 2018: Neuberger urges Jews to leave Labour
• Jewish Chronicle, 2019: Neuberger's book on antisemitism
• PBS Amanpour, 2019: Neuberger on the Chief Rabbi's intervention

 

Bibliography

Book under review

• Warnock, Barbara, and Toby Simpson, eds. Anti-Antisemitism: Countering Anti-Jewish Racism in Western Europe, 1890–2022. Foreword by Julia Neuberger. London: The Wiener Holocaust Library, 2022.

Books and documents

• Equality and Human Rights Commission. Investigation into Antisemitism in the Labour Party. London: EHRC, October 2020.
• Forde, Martin. The Forde Report. London: The Labour Party, July 2022.
• International Court of Justice. Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), Order on Provisional Measures, 26 January 2024.
• International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. "Working Definition of Antisemitism." Adopted 26 May 2016.
• Neuberger, Julia. Antisemitism: What It Is. What It Isn't. Why It Matters. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2019.
• Sonabend, Daniel. We Fight Fascists: The 43 Group and Their Forgotten Battle for Post-War Britain. London: Verso, 2019.
• Trotsky, Leon. "Appeal to American Jews Menaced by Fascism and Anti-Semitism." December 1938.
• Trotsky, Leon. The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971.
• The Wiener Holocaust Library. Fighting Antisemitism from Dreyfus to Today. Exhibition catalogue. London, 2022.
• Zola, Émile. "J'accuse…!" L'Aurore, 13 January 1898.

Press and online sources

• "Jewish Peer Attacks Labour for Having a 'Very Particular Problem' with Antisemitism." Jewish Chronicle, 28 April 2016. Link
• "Senior Rabbi Baroness Julia Neuberger Urges Jews to Leave Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party." Jewish Chronicle, 22 June 2018. Link
• "Rabbi Julia Neuberger Rails Against Labour Antisemitism." Jewish Chronicle, 30 May 2019. Link
• "Senior Rabbi Julia Neuberger Talks Antisemitism in the UK." Amanpour and Company, PBS, 27 November 2019. Link
• The Wiener Holocaust Library. "Book Launch: Anti-Antisemitism." Event listing, 15 November 2022. Link
• The Wiener Holocaust Library. Fighting Antisemitism from Dreyfus to Today. Online exhibition. Link

 

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[1] Anti-Antisemitism: Countering Anti-Jewish Racism in Western Europe, 1890–2022, edited by Barbara Warnock and Toby Simpson, with a foreword by Rabbi Baroness Julia Neuberger. The Wiener Holocaust Library, 2022.