The back story to this novel risks overshadowing the story itself. Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz was twenty-three when he wrote The Passenger in a four week frenzy directly after Kristallnacht in 1938. He himself had escaped to England a few years beforehand via a rather convoluted route across mainland Europe. The novel was published to little notice but then when war broke out, Boschwitz found himself interned as an 'enemy alien' on the Isle of Man, then deported to a prison camp in New South Wales, finally reclassified as a 'friendly alien' in 1942 and put on a boat back to Britain. At this point however, his boat was torpedoed by a German submarine and he was killed along with all the other passengers. He was twenty-seven years old. Seventy years later, the original manuscript of The Passenger was discovered in Frankfurt and then updated with the intended revisions he described in a letter to his mother. It is this version which has now been published. As a contemporary account of Germany's descent into cruelty and chaos, it is electrifying and utterly unique. As a book, it is one of the most sobering depictions of the depths to which humanity can descend that I can ever remember.

Lead character is Otto Silbermann, a well-off merchant with a comfortable middle class life. Until now. Prior to Kristallnacht, his Jewishness has been strictly theoretical. As he points out repeatedly, he does not even look Jewish. His wife is not Jewish. But still he bears the label that he cannot escape. The walls are closing in and they do so rapidly. His anguished calls for aid from his son in Paris are futile. The nightmare of the situation cannot be understood by those who are not living in it. Even the characters themselves struggle to believe it. Silbermann's wife frets that they should have fled the year before but she had not wished to leave her family. Silbermann admits that he had not wanted to leave his business. The truth is that neither of them had expected things to reach this extreme. To the untrained eye, Germany appears as before. People go to work, head to cafes, go about their business, board trains. But the truth is that they have turned on part of their population and the speed with which they turn to savagery is breath-taking.

The state-sponsored Anti-Semitism is not what makes The Passenger such a brutal novel. The horrors that the Nazi government visited upon their Jewish subjects is well-known. What shocked me most were the more mundane betrayals which Silbermann encounters. He visits the same cafe that he has frequented for years and the waiter who has previously been so polite asks him to leave. The receptionist at the hotel he tries to check into curls their lip. Silbermann has been used to a privileged existence - the foreword aptly describes him as 'almost likeable' - and the sudden disappearance of these expected courtesies shatters him. But there is worse.

Silbermann has been trying to sell his apartment but even the knockdown price that he has originally agreed has to be dramatically lowered as the buyer is aware of his desperation. However, the ultimate treachery comes from his business partner. Silbermann and Becker were soldiers together for three years. They built the company together, worked as partners for twenty years. In the early pages of the book, Becker tells him 'In these uncertain times, in this unclear world, there's only one thing that can be relied on, and that is friendship...for me you are a man - a German man, not a Jew'. But then Becker abruptly dissolves the partnership and ends the friendship. Becker walks off consoling himself that he will make it right 'one day' but the truth is that nobody wants to risk associating with a Jew and nobody feels the slightest guilt in fleecing one either.

From the very beginning, Silbermann is a man under incredible pressure and the tension only ever builds. He escapes his apartment by the skin of his teeth as the Brownshirts hammer at the door. From there, he is a fugitive. He does not even find solidarity among his fellow Jews since their racial features mark him as a target. One of the most heartbreaking scenes is when he rejects the overtures of comradeship from an elderly Jewish friend who is also on the run. For all that he has endured betrayal, Silbermann's desire for self-preservation is no less primitive. Like any animal backed into a corner, he is ready to bite.

Over the course of the novel, Silbermann boards train and after train. Initially there is some design in this. At one point he even makes a very brief illegal crossing into Belgium before being sent back. But Silbermann's train travel becomes increasingly desperate, disintegrating into minute-by-minute survival. He has to stay ahead of those checking papers, to get his 'Heil Hitler' in at the right time and even then every so often his fellow passengers becomes suspicious. He is constantly moving but he is going nowhere.

The most chilling aspect of The Passenger however is that it was written in 1938. The prescience with which Boschwitz described the situation and foretold its next steps genuinely brought me out in gooseflesh. Silbermann considers the way that he and his fellow Jews have had their assets stripped and ponders, 'Perhaps they’ll carefully undress us first and then kill us, so our clothes won’t get bloody and our banknotes won’t get damaged'. After all,'These days murder is performed economically.' The meeting to discuss the Final Solution did not take place until January 1942, nine months before Boschwitz's own death, but The Passenger clearly observes that this was the direction of travel right from the beginning.

The whole novel has the odour of personal trauma. Boschwitz is writing from apparent safety in Britain but is fierce in how he imagines the nightmarish plight of the Jew in Germany. Towards the end, Silbermann manages to have an open conversation with a fellow passenger. This exchange truly stands as dialogue on behalf of all the Jewish fugitives and refugees. The woman suggests that Silbermann flee the country, to which he asks how could he cross and where would have him. She then rather foolishly suggests trying to enjoy himself and make the most of his remaining time. Boschwitz is spelling out just how impossible it is to explain the Nazi peril to those who are not being persecuted.

But The Passenger is not simply a Holocaust novel. Its story resonates through to the modern age for any persecuted minority. Silbermann's desperate flight becomes more and more like a bird trapped and crashing into the walls of its cage. I think of the Syrian refugees, Afghanistan, Ukraine, the list goes on. Boschwitz drives home the horror of losing everything, of the utter meaninglessness of currency which cannot save you. During Silbermann's brief flit into Belgium, he explains his situation clearly and the foreign border guards are utterly without compassion. The Nazi government were making no effort to hide how they were legislating against the Jews and still other countries kept their gates closed. But when we look around at the global distresses which still exist, has humanity really learned anything? I am not sure we have.

Still beyond all of this, I feel such sorrow for Boschwitz who wrote this in a moment of physical safety only to once more take up the role of the passenger once more, shipped hither and thither and no longer in control of his destiny. That his journey finally ended in terror is shattering. The Passenger bears witness to his experience, to what he went through and also to the clear signs of what lay ahead. The idea that any German citizen could claim ignorance of the Nazi plans for the Jews is nonsensical. When Becker mumbles to himself about making it right with Silbermann further down the line, we know these for empty words. There will be no later.

I was reminded of Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Française which had a similar journey to publication. I remember reading one of her daughters' words on the novel's modern resurgence. She described it not as vengeance but rather a victory of sorts. I hope that The Passenger can represent a similar legacy for Boschwitz. His was a voice which deserved to be heard then but which is just as important today.

The Passenger or Die Reisende in its original German is a rediscovered German classic which was only published in the original German in 2018, far from the time the story was written. There is a reason in its late publication and it’s more or less related to the story itself as well as the life of the author which mirrored our main character in the story. Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz did not live to see the publication of his works in Germany since he was on a ship that was torpedoed by a German submarine in 1942, while on his way from Australia to England. He had been in a continuous flight since 1935 due to his status as a Jew up until his death seven years later. He was 27.

Mirroring the author’s own experience, our main character Otto Silbermann is a German-Jewish business owner living in Berlin who tries to avoid persecution right after the Kristallnacht or also known as the Night of the Broken Glass. The name Kristallnacht comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the smashing of the windows of Jewish-owned businesses, buildings and synagogues. It was carried out by the Sturmabteilung and German civilians alike during the night of 9-10 November 1938 with no interventions by the German authorities. The officially-known pretext for Kristallnacht is something that happened far from the event in Germany, namely the assassination of Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomat in Paris, by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old German-born Polish Jew. It is widely acknowledged by historians that Kristallnacht is the turning point that marks the start of the open confrontation towards Jews in the Third Reich and paves the way to the Holocaust.

Silbermann is unlike any typical Jewish. Apart from his surname, he has no typical Jewish features. As other characters have noted, Silbermann passes as an Aryan from his outlook. But his house was ransacked during the Kristallnacht pogrom, after which his wife, who is purely Aryan, lives with her brother and he has been living on the run from one city to the next. The title pretty much sums up Silbermann’s life after escaping from his house in Berlin. He is a passenger, and as such, he is at the mercy of the driver to take him to his destination. But the problem for Silbermann is that he does not even have any destination in mind. It is no longer possible for him to escape out of the country legally since the policy has changed in the past few months leading to the event.

So after that, Silbermann becomes a passenger travelling from one city to another. He hops from one train into another train, often without any stopover, to the point that he memorises all train schedules around Germany. It reminds me somehow of Iggy Pop’s 1977 song The Passenger which was inspired by his experience riding the S-Bahn every day during the time he lived in West Berlin with David Bowie: “I am a passenger/ And I ride and I ride/ I ride through the city's backsides/ I see the stars come out of the sky/ Yeah, they're bright in a hollow sky/ You know it looks so good tonight”. During his journey, Silbermann experiences many life-changing experiences that brings him out of his comfort zones, ranging from seeing beautiful sceneries in Dresden to a random romantic encounter with a woman called Ursula in one of the trains he hopped on. But apart from all, Silbermann is always on the lookout for the danger that awaits him. He could no longer trust other human beings, as his experience of being ransacked in his house and being cheated by a friend who has been through the Great War with him no longer brings much sense into his world. The world has gone mad in his head and he could clearly say: “I don’t have the right to be an ordinary human being. More is demanded of me.”

Almost one century after the period when Silbermann supposedly lived, his story in this book paints the psychological madness that taunts him in his time. It provides rich details of how it feels like to be persecuted when someone could no longer trust friends, relatives, and even the state to hold the criminals accountable. Silbermann served Germany in the Great War, risking his life for the Kaiser just like anyone else during that period. He is never late in paying his taxes to the state. Yet in the end, Silbermann met a dark end with his fate as a minority, echoing the mood of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz with its familiar working-class characters and the gloomy mood of the 1930s Berlin in the eve of the Second World War.

One of the best thrillers I have ever read. The tension the Boschwitz creates is phenomenal, reading this book is a very immersive experience. I'm so thankful this novel has been rediscovered, as it shines a light on a period that is often reported secondhand.

I have read quite a few books of historical fiction based around wars. It is different to read one written at the time by someone who actually experienced something similar to the story's plot. The introduction carried with it its own piece of surprise that had me feeling sad even before I started reading the story. The cruel twist of fate seemed too much of a coincidence to be true, but unfortunately, it was.
This is a reprint of a book first published in 1939. It focuses the narrative on a seemingly unimportant part of the issues plaguing the jews at the time, but their new normal was pretty harsh to watch unfold, especially from the point of one who was only partially affected until everything started to boil over. Our lead protagonist is a Jewish man who does not have the outward appearance of one and a Christian wife. He has begun the process of leaving the country, but there are many obstacles in his path.
On a seemingly ordinary day, he finds himself in immediate danger, and he sets off in an attempt to escape. The futility of the exercise and every conversation he has on the way is what the book is all about. It is not a big volume but felt like a very different read!
I received an ARC thanks to NetGalley and the publishers but the review is entirely based on my own reading experience.

The Passenger has been hailed as a remarkable literary discovery, a lost novel of heart-stopping intensity and harrowing absurdity about flight and persecution in 1930s Germany. Don't let the innocuous, almost generic title fool you, this is a story that is both poignant and compelling. Berlin, November 1938. Jewish shops have been ransacked and looted, synagogues destroyed. As stormtroopers pound on his door, Otto Silbermann, a respected businessman who fought for Germany in the Great War, is forced to sneak out the back of his own home as a result of the November pogroms. His relatives and friends have been arrested or have disappeared. Turned away from establishments he had long patronised, and fearful of being exposed as a Jew despite his Aryan looks, he boards a train. And then another. And another - until his flight becomes a frantic odyssey across Germany, as he searches first for information, then for help, and finally for escape. He himself tries to remain invisible, takes train by train, aimlessly travels across the country with nowhere to go and a briefcase full of money that he was able to save from the henchmen of the Nazi regime. At first, he still thinks he can flee abroad. However, his attempt to illegally cross the border fails.

In the middle of a state of emergency, he observes the indifference of the masses, the pity of a few. And also his own fear. His travels on the Deutsche Reichsbahn bring him face-to-face with waiters and conductors, officials and fellow outcasts, seductive women and vicious thieves, a few of whom disapprove of the regime while the rest embrace it wholeheartedly. Clinging to his existence as it was just days before, Silbermann refuses to believe what is happening even as he is beset by opportunists, betrayed by associates, and bereft of family, friends, and fortune. As his world collapses around him, he is forced to concede that his nightmare is all too real. This is a riveting and palpably tense fact meets fiction read with a very real and prominent sense of foreboding underpinning the narrative. An evocative, richly detailed and absorbing story of the horrors of Kristallnacht complete with an oppressive and desperately claustrophobic atmosphere and a surprising dose of sardonicism. The fear, displacement and sheer terror Jews experienced is felt on every single page and results in a deeply moving, rapid-fire paced novel. One of the most powerful representations of the hell of Jewish life under Nazi rule and a compulsive character study, this is a taut, indelible and glorious work of fiction.

“Berlin-Hamburg, he thought.
Hamburg-Berlin.
Dortmund-Aachen.
Aachen-Dortmund.
And it may go on that way forever.”

That’s what goes through Otto Silbermann’s mind as he wearily enters yet another train in Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s superbly crafted short novel “The Passenger”. Silbermann has just escaped through the back door of his house even as army men pound on his front door. It’s the beginning of the murderous ‘Kristallnacht’ although he doesn’t know it yet. He has some cash on him and he expects to get some more from his business partner soon.

As Silbermann rushes from station to station, his predominant feeling of paranoia comes off the pages in waves. Large portions of the book comprise almost entirely of his inner monologues, which question the prevailing attitudes and his identity. Although he is blessed with non-Jewish looks and can pass off for a German, fear has now become his second skin. When the book begins, he comes across as a man with poise.
“…after all, he served on the front in the Great War, he dutifully pays his taxes, runs a respected business; in short, Otto Silbermann is a thoroughly upstanding citizen.”

However, each trip and encounter shreds his confidence, instilling more fear. He finds that he cannot trust anyone and has nowhere to go anymore. His initially relaxed demeanour is now replaced with a claustrophobia as the spaces open to him become narrower. In fact, I think the length of the novel itself, at just over 250 pages (mine is the Pushkin Press version), is a clever mirroring of how Silbermann is constantly boxed-in in trains.
I also think the book is unique in that it’s not just about the experiences of Silbermann or the Jews. It’s also about the quotidian lives of Germans from a cross-section of society. Silbermann often has conversations with his fellow passengers who range from miners to lawyers to a stenotypist. They have lives, separate and removed from the war. They are worried about wages, they talk about the weather, and contemplate the stock markets.

Boschwitz was just 23-years-old when he wrote this book at a time when he himself was on the run from Nazi Germany. He only wrote two novels in his short life (he died when he was 27) but the manuscripts were missing for a long time. It’s only recently that The Passenger was rediscovered and translated, and very finely so by Philip Boehm.

There’s a lot more to talk about in The Passenger but my space is limited.

Highly recommended. Thank you to Pushkin Press for the review copy.

This novel was written in 1938, before the start of WWII, but when anti-Semitism was not only on the rise in Germany, but had become openly acceptable. Sadly, the author died in 1942, but, thankfully, this book has now been rediscovered and republished. It gives the reader a real sense of what being Jewish meant in Germany at that time and the sense of hopelessness and despair that people felt, as their own country turned on them.

Our central character is Otto Silbermann. A successful businessman, he does not look stereotypically Jewish. His wife is Aryan and he has built a good life for himself. However, his world is about to be turned upside down, when he has to question his entire life. We meet him when his German business partner is headed off for a meeting and he is talking of selling his apartment to another ‘friend.’ However, are these people really his friends, or are they out to cheat him? When he hears of Jewish men being arrested and Nazi’s arrive on his doorstep, Silbermann is forced to flee.

What follows is an endless journey, as Silbermann wonders what to do and where to go. Once confident, prosperous and at home, he now suffers the petty humiliations of those who once greeting him averting their eyes, questioning his right to inhabit the spaces he was once comfortable in and trying to profit from his situation. He was a man who clung to law and order, but the rules have deserted him and he has become a man who has left it too late.

We follow Otto’s progress as he questions who he can trust. Bewildered, hounded, full of despair, indignation and incredulity, he constantly looks upon Germany with surprise. Civilisation has deserted him, as the very fabric of history shifts. He looks to the law, to government, to politicians to save him, when they are the very people planning his downfall. This is an important novel, which was written at the time events unfolded, without the benefit of hindsight. I am pleased to have had the opportunity to have read it. I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.

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.

My thanks to the publisher for an advanced review copy of this extraordinary novel, which was written in 1938 before the outbreak of the Second World War by Boschwitz at the age of 23. He was himself killed on a ship torpedoed in 1942 and what a loss he was!

The book charts the railway journeys Otto Silbermann, erstwhile small business man, takes as his world falls apart. Silbermann does not look very Jewish and so many people in different walks of life speak with him on his journey through terror. Some know he is a Jew and others do not.

This book is the answer to anyone who thinks it could not possibly happen here or now, as this is what Silbermann thinks, even as he has to flee from his flat and barter hopelessly for some recompense for the remains of his world.

What makes this book especially astonishing, apart from the prescient way the author describes what would constitute efficient mass murder, is the meticulous way he captures the thoughts and motivations of ordinary people complicit in the prevailing anti Semitic orthodoxy of the Nazi party. That he has made the main character of the book a less than admirable, indeed rather dislikable, man makes the force of his tortured response to his deteriorating and insane position all the more riveting.

This is a must read book. It sadly does not reflect the editing Boschwitz proposed to make as this has been lost, so some parts of the book work better than others, but in its gripping insights, it reminds me of Hans Fallada’s fiction at its best.

This is a most remarkable book by a young man who was both German and Jewish. Otto Silberman's life is shattered on Kristallnacht, November 1938. He escapes his home with the Nazi's banging on the door, and goes on the run, trying to conceal his Jewishness and survive in the wake of World War II, becoming a passenger on one train after the other and he travels across a Germany that is no longer his home. It is a book I will definitely recommend and read again.

After Hans Fallada, Anna Seghers and Heinz Rein last year, we are still blessed with new publications in Europe of unknown and utterly captivating fictional accounts of the Jewish plight before and during WWII in Germany. I read the Passenger in one setting, totally mesmerized by the story of a man entrapped and unable to escape a catastrophic situation. I was entranced by the cinematic flow of the narration and its agonizing fearful drive. This novel is a worthy addition to the genre, a wonderful German novel. I can't wait to get a French translation in order to read it again!

Many thanks to Netgalley and the editor for allowing me to discover such a wonderful and powerful novel.