FIVE THINGS ABOUT A WRITER WHO FORETOLD NAZI HORRORS
1 THE AUTHOR
Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz was travelling to England when he was killed with 362 others on board a British ship that was torpedoed by a German submarine in 1942. He was 27. Born in Berlin in 1915, Boschwitz studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and joined his mother in England in 1939. Like most Germans who fled the Nazi regime, they were placed in internment, in a camp on the Isle of Man. As the war progressed, male refugees were shipped to various British dominions and he was transported to Australia. After the attack on Pearl Harbour, the refugees were reclassified as “friendly aliens” and Boschwitz was freed, later beginning his return to England. Now a powerful novel he wrote in late 1938, a prophetic and chilling portrait of life under the Nazis, is expected to find new readers across the world.
2 THE BOOK
With the pace of a gripping thriller, The Passenger has been compared to masterpieces by Franz Kafka and Hans Fallada. It was written in the final months before the war, shortly after Kristallnacht in November 1938, when Jews were beaten, arrested and murdered as their synagogues, homes and businesses were attacked. Deeply affected by the horrors of Kristallnacht, Boschwitz worked feverishly on The Passenger, the story of a German-Jewish man on the run from the Gestapo across a homeland that is no longer home.
3 THE REDISCOVERY
Although published in English in 1939, The Passenger fell out of print and was forgotten until a German editor, Peter Graf, found the original German typescript in an archive in Frankfurt. It was recently published for the first time in Germany, having never appeared in its original language before, and proved an immediate hit, selling 50,000 copies.
4 THE ENGLISH PUBLISHER
Adam Freudenheim, of Pushkin Press, a U.K., will release the book next month, shortly before a U.S. edition. In 2009, Freudenheim published the English translation of Fallada's Alone in Berlin, a 1947 thriller set in Nazi Germany, which became a success more than six decades after it was written.
5 THE RECEPTION
One newspaper, Suddeutsche Zeitung, described The Passenger as “a miracle.” Stern magazine said it was one of the most important books of the year, and added: “The insight into the atmosphere of the times is so deep, so immediate, it will make you feel as though you'd accompanied the hero yourself.”