Writer foretold Nazi horror
A rediscovered 1938 novel depicts life in prewar Germany
AGerman-Jewish author killed by the Nazis seems likely to become a bestseller after the book he wrote on living under the regime was rediscovered by publishers.
Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz was travelling to England when he was killed with 362 others on board a British ship torpedoed by a German submarine in 1942. He was 27.
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.
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.
The Passenger is the story of a German-Jewish man on the run from the Gestapo across a homeland that is no longer home.
Otto Silbermann escapes German stormtroopers who bang at his door. He takes train after train as he tries to cross the border, always in danger of being arrested or denounced. “The truth is I don’t have the right to be an ordinary human being,” he says.
Jews had not yet been forced to wear a yellow star, and Silbermann hears a waiter say that if they were made to wear a yellow band on their sleeve they would be easier to spot. Silbermann says at one point: “They came to arrest me and they smashed up my apartment”.
Adam Freudenheim, of Pushkin Press, a British publisher, will release the book next month, shortly before a US edition. He said it captured the immediate aftermath of Kristallnacht better than any novel he had read. “It is a major rediscovery, pretty extraordinary. It feels like a breathless suspense novel in a way, and yet it’s also got shades of Kafka because it’s so absurd. It’s told with huge narrative flair and reads like a Hitchcock film.”
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. Stern magazine said: “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”.
Born in Berlin in 1915, Boschwitz joined his mother in England in 1939. They were placed in internment on the Isle of Man. He was transported to Australia, freed, and began his return to England.
Graf said: “Boschwitz was not only describing the trap into which hundreds of thousands of Jews in Germany had fallen, he was also writing in despair about his own fate.”
Writer Andre´ Aciman said The Passenger “could not have been more prescient of the terror the Nazis would unleash”.