The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz

The Passenger

by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz

translated by Philip Boehm

                                

Whatever I've done in the past, he thought, looks different today than it did back then, because now my humanity is called into question, because I am a Jew...

A while back I had read On the End of the World, a Pushkin Press collection of essays penned by Joseph Roth between the First and Second World War. What had struck me then was the fact that Roth, a down-and-out author trying to survive in a Paris hotel, could easily discern the dangers of the Nazi ideology, even while major world powers were trying to appease Hitler and ignore what was happening “on the ground”. Those essays were a stern warning that, contrary to what is sometimes stated, ordinary people could and should have realised the inhumanity of the regime but found it convenient to turn a blind eye as long as they were not directly affected. How could this happen, one might fairly ask?  How could the rest of society have tolerated the regime’s systematic abuse of Jews and other minorities? 

The Passenger, a novel by Ulrich A. Boschwitz, confronts precisely that question through the fictional story of a Jew on the run.  Boschwitz originally wrote the book in 1938, when he was just twenty-three, as a reaction to the events of Kristallnacht. He had it published in English translation (as The Traveller) under the pseudonym John Grane. Boschwitz himself was the son of a Jewish businessman and he emigrated to Sweden with his mother in 1935 after receiving the draft order from the Wehrmacht. This was followed by stays in Norway, Luxembourg (where he was expelled by the police), and Belgium, before the family settled in England in 1939.  Ulrich’s nomadic existence didn’t stop here. Despite having escaped the Nazis, he was branded an “enemy alien” by the UK Government, and interned in a camp on the Isle of Man.  He was later deported to Australia.  Boschwitz was finally allowed back to England in 1942, but tragically, he perished, along with 361 of his fellow travellers, when the ship he was on was torpedoed in the Atlantic.

In his last letter before the fateful voyage, Boschwitz had informed his mother that he was working on a new version of his novel and instructed her to have an experienced author implement revisions should he never make it home.  To a personal tragedy was added a literary one, since the first 109 pages of his reworked version, to which Boschwitz made specific  reference in his letter, have never come to light. 

The Traveller was forgotten for several decades, until it was republished in its original language in 2018, under the title Der Reisende.  The new edition was based on Boaschwtiz’s original German typescript, discovered in a Frankfurt archive, and interpolated editorial additions and reworkings reflecting what is known of the author’s intentions.  The Passenger is an English translation of this revised version, in a translation by Philip Boehm.  The Pushkin Press edition features a preface by André Aciman, and an afterword by Peter Graf.

The premise of the novel is easily summed up. It is 1938, the eve of the Second World War, and Jews in Berlin are being rounded up. Otto Silbermann is a respected German-Jewish businessman who fought for his country in the Great War and yet he is forced to escape out of the back of his own home, hoping that his wife, who is Aryan, can survive on her own. His business partners take the opportunity to fleece him, and he is turned away from his usual haunts. Nothing remains for him but to escape by embarking on train journeys criss-crossing the Reich. His “Aryan” looks allow him to lay low and observe the people around him.  His almost surreal odyssey brings him face to face with a Germany that keeps going on its daily business, despite the unfolding terror and atrocities of the regime.   

The Passenger has the feel of a thriller but ultimately turns into an existential, Kafkaesque exploration of how perfectly ordinary people can condone state-backed crimes.  It is often breathless, feverish and exciting but this is no “entertainment”.  On the contrary, The Passenger is a sobering and sometimes harrowing read, with a particularly devastating ending.  It is also a timely eye-opener.  

ebook, Hardcover

Expected publication: April 1st 2021 by Pushkin Press (first published 1939)