The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz
This is a book that has been creating quite a stir recently. Written in 1938 by Boschwitz, a young German Jew who had fled to London from his homeland to escape the Nazis. This long-neglected story about life in Germany on the brink of the second world war has just been re-launched and published for the first time in Germany; and it is drawing favourable comparisons with contemporaneous fictional accounts of this turbulent period such as ’Suite Francaise’ and ‘Alone in Berlin’ – high praise indeed.
‘The Passenger’ is a powerful, tense and slightly unusual story that begins in Berlin in 1938 but goes on to provide a panoramic account of the atmosphere and attitudes prevalent in the third reich just at the moment when the brutalities and persecution of the Jews were about to intensify. In a dramatic opening, Hitler’s thugs are rounding up Berlin’s Jews in a bogus response to an assassination in Paris. They arrive at the home of Otto Silbermann, who is forced to flee out the back door and keep moving. And that in essence is the plot – the novel is subtitled ‘The man who took trains’ and Otto spends most of the novel moving around the country in a Kafkaesque limbo where all his attempts to escape the country or seek other possible solutions are thwarted.
Whilst the plot is undoubtedly exciting and tense the book is an inside account of what it is like to find your world and your place in it turned upside down. And Otto’s place had seemed assured, secure and fulfilling for many years: he is a successful and wealthy businessman, a veteran of the first world war with a solid family life, social status and a sense of belonging. He is intelligent, a little complacent and slightly detached from the lower classes – not a hero just a very realistic member of the bourgeoisie. He had his chance to leave Germany a couple of years earlier but like many he felt that Hitler was a passing phase, that the good sense of his countrymen would reassert itself. Now it is too late.
As he travels around Germany he encounters all types of citizens: hard line Nazis who treat him with courtesy and respect due to his wealth and Aryan features; ordinary citizens too self-centred or cowed to speak out; a few brave idealists who risk everything to help the victims of the new order; and other Jews inhabiting a similar tormented inner exile to himself. One of the most disturbing scenes is when he separates himself from an old acquaintance whose too Jewish features might increase the threat to Silbermann if they were to become travelling companions.
All this, we experience close up and personal with Silbermann. At times the narrative reads like a stream of consciousness narrative as he alternates between manic energy to take control of his life and a listless sense of drift as every plan meets an unmoveable block. Eventually, his ‘groundhog day’ of hellish frustration impacts on his emotional stability and psychological ability to imagine a way out; and because we are forced to follow his internal thoughts and feelings as he scurries around, we feel, experience and understand the disintegration of a man that Boschwitz presents to us.
The great strength of this book, which makes it a vital text, is the undoubted authenticity of life under the Nazis, the complex mood of fear and exhilaration in the country and that awful sense of your own turning on you. The content of this book makes it a classic but I do not think that the writing matches its insights. That’s no surprise: Boschwitz was in his twenties and this was only his second book. It is a young man’s urgent response to the growing crisis in his homeland and so there is some immaturity in his technique. He also did not have the chance to revise his first draft as his life was tragically cut short in 1942 – by the way, it is worth reading what happened to him after he sought refuge in Britain. Yet despite these niggles, this is an important and thrilling (in an awful way) novel. It provides an account of this terrible period that gave me a perspective I had not previously experienced.