Boschwitz, Ulrich Alexander "The Passenger"

Boschwitz, Ulrich Alexander "The Passenger" aka "The Fugitive" (German: Der Reisende) - 1939

This is my eighth Classic Spin and we were given #11.

I had never heard of this author when I found the book in a bookshop. But the description sounded interesting, a book one had to read. So I bought it. Apparently, this novel was first published as a translation in English as "The man who took trains" in the UK and "The Fugitive" in the US under the pseudonym John Grane. Posthumously. Because his destiny would make an interesting story, as well. As so many Jews, he couldn't get away, he was a Jew in Germany and a Nazi in other countries. So, the British interned him as "enemy alien" and sent him to Australia. When he returned to Europe, his ship was torpedoed and sank, and with it the author and his last manuscript. Let us think about people like him when we don't welcome refugees.

You can see how the protagonist changes with the circumstances he is in. How he first believes that his Arian friends will help him, how he then thinks with the money he has left he can get away, how he tries again and again to leave Germany and a certain destiny of death.

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz was only 23 when he wrote this book but I think you can tell that he was wise beyond his age, probably for all the events he had seen and had to live through.

The book "disappeared" for several decades. I am glad it was found again.

From the back cover:

"Hailed as a remarkable literary discovery, a lost novel of heart-stopping intensity and harrowing absurdity about flight and persecution in 1930s Germany

Berlin, November 1938. Jewish shops have been ransacked and looted, synagogues destroyed. As storm troopers 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. Turned away from establishments he had long patronized, 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. His travels 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.

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. Taut, immediate, infused with acerbic Kafkaesque humor, The Passenger is an indelible portrait of a man and a society careening out of control."

If you want to see what others were reading, have a look here.