The Passenger

Berlin, November 1938. With storm troopers battering against his door, Otto Silberman must flee out the back of his own home. He emerges onto streets thrumming with violence: it is Kristallnacht, and synagogues are being burnt, Jews rounded up and their businesses destroyed. Turned away from establishments he had long patronised, betrayed by friends and colleagues, Otto finds his life as a respected businessman has dissolved overnight. Desperately trying to conceal his Jewish identity, he takes train after train across Germany in a race to escape this homeland that is no longer home. Twenty-three-year-old Ulrich Boschwitz wrote The Passenger at breakneck speed in 1938, fresh in the wake of the Kristallnacht pogroms, and his prose flies at the same pace. Shot through with Hitchcockian tension, The Passenger is a blisteringly immediate story of flight and survival in Nazi Germany.

About the Author :
Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz was born into a German-Jewish family in Berlin in 1915. He undertook a business apprenticeship and seemed poised for a business career, but following the rise of the Nazis he and his mother were forced to flee Germany. They went first to Sweden and then to Norway, eventually settling in Britain. There they were arrested in 1940 and held in an internment camp; Boschwitz was deported to Australia and imprisoned there for two years. He died when the ship he was returning to Europe on in 1942 was torpedoed by a German submarine; he was only 27 years old.

Review :
Remarkable... disabused, prophetic, and flawlessly penetrating A very welcome rediscovery A story that is part John Buchan, part Franz Kafka and wholly riveting. It is also uncannily prescient [...] a gripping novel that plunges the reader into the gloom of Nazi Germany as the darkness was descending. It deserved to be read when it was written. It certainly deserves to be read now There have been a number of great novels about the Second World War that have come to light again in recent times, most notably Suite Française and Alone in Berlin. I'm not sure that The Passenger might not be the greatest of them This year's essential literary rediscovery Gripping and viscerally affecting... Boschwitz's feel for his setting and characters makes most of the historical fiction written about the Nazi era seem simplistic and ersatz A powerful book that truly captures that experience of being stripped of who you are By turns claustrophobic, dizzying and symbolic, The Passenger is a work with sufficient pace to be a thriller, yet possessed of enough nuance and psychological depth to be of real literary weight A German-Jewish author killed by the Nazis is to become a bestseller after the book he wrote on living under the regime was rediscovered by publishers... [The] powerful novel he wrote in 1938, a prophetic and chilling portrait of life under the Nazis, is expected to find new readers across the world All too chillingly real. Originally published quietly in 1938, this reissue is now a deserving bestseller The Passenger is both a poignant soliloquy on the nature of sudden loss and uncertainty, and a vivid picture of what it was to be Jewish and hunted down as the Nazis embarked on their crusade of extermination... [Silbermann's] sense of terror and incomprehension is captured with a rare immediacy [An] existential exploration of the self, apathy, and moral decay. It is a book that gets under your skin [...] This book is a timely eye-opener and certainly worth one's attention and admiration A taut and chilling story With The Passenger alone, Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz claims a place alongside the likes of Thomas Mann, Heinrich Böll and Hans Fallada as one of 20th century Germany's greatest novelists A remarkable rediscovery At times The Passenger reads as though a painting by the German anti-Nazi artist George Grosz has been turned into words, the text almost vibrating with fury at the lies, theft, murder and betrayal. It is also a highly accomplished work, filled with vivid characterisation, sharp dialogue and intensely observed scenes... This English edition, skilfully translated by Philip Boehm, is a fitting memorial to a writer of great insight and talent - and an important historical work that vividly recreates the terror experienced by Jews in 1930s Germany A riveting, noirish, intensely filmic portrait... a jewel of a rediscovery: At once a deeply satisfying novel and a vital historical document It has the dramatic tension of a Hitchcock thriller and the claustrophobic paranoia of Kafka. Its psychologically flawed central character is so vividly realised he might have wandered into Boschwitz's story from the pages of Dostoevsky... [The] writing is controlled, vivid and crammed with psychological insight A tragicomic fable of the human condition and a comedy of morals and characters of exceptional psychological acuity, The Passenger evokes the worlds of Kafka and Charlie Chaplin The Passenger is a miracle One of the most important books of the year... 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 The Passenger is a chronicle of dehumanisation with the pace of a thriller, evoking Kafka's The Trial or Imre Kertész's books Although written more than 80 years ago, this book qualifies as a 'breath-taking thriller'. It is as if Kafka and Tom Clancy were sent together as reporters into the abyss of Germany in 1938 Silbermann is a morally contradictory protagonist, which is exactly what makes him so powerful and convincing: On the one hand, he is selfless and generous, on the other a hardened and egotistical person. No hero, but a human being whose behaviour has just one aim: survival An incredibly gripping rediscovery There is no literary novel on the year of 1938 or the pogroms (Night of Broken Glass). The Passenger fills this gap, transferring the documented horror and mass suffering into the free space of fiction. It's a story about emigration and deportation, about new beginnings and failed hopes: one of the many tragedies of exile. But it is also a story of a talent in the making A masterpiece The Passenger is not only an important and gripping historical testimony, written in real time, but also a shattering story for our own time This re-translation of The Passenger proves that the text deserves better recognition, amongst the totems of literature written in the light of one of the twentieth century's most harrowing collective crimes against humanity