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
- Pushkin
Press, Berlin Shuffle, book page (UK hardback, 15
January 2026).
- Library
Journal, review of Berlin Shuffle, November 2025.
- Publishers
Weekly, review of Berlin Shuffle, 17 September 2025.
- Wikipedia,
“Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz”, accessed 24 October
2026.
- Glenn
Nicholls, “Hell
or high waters”, Inside Story, 7 April 2018.
- Shiny
New Books, review of The Passenger.
- Lawrence
De Maria, “Berlin Shuffle: A Novel”, Washington Independent
Review of Books, 13 January 2026.
- David
Herman, “Berlin Shuffle review: Pimps, prostitutes and peddlers in
Weimar Germany”, Jewish Chronicle, 9 January 2026.
- Jewish
Book Council, review of Berlin Shuffle, 8 December 2025.
- Harvard
Book Store, Berlin Shuffle listing, collecting review
extracts from the Guardian, Financial Times, The Times
and Kirkus Reviews.
- Wikipedia,
“Blutmai”,
drawing on Chris Bowlby, “Blutmai 1929: Police, Parties and Proletarians
in a Berlin Confrontation,” Historical Journal 29:1 (1986).
- History
Today, “Who Voted for the Nazis?”
- Leon
Trotsky, “The Turn in the Communist International and the Situation
in Germany”, 26 September 1930.
- 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.
- Leon
Trotsky, “Germany, the Key to the International Situation”, 26
November 1931.
- The
Federal Returning Officer, “2025 Bundestag election: final result”, 14 March
2025; provisional result, 24 February 2025.
- Ruth
Margalit, review of The Passenger, New York Review of
Books, 18 November 2021.
- 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.
"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.
[1]
The Passenger, by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, translated by Philip Boehm,
with an introduction by André Aciman (Pushkin Press Classics)
