On October 29, 1942, Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz was approximately seven hundred nautical miles northwest of the Azores aboard the MV Abosso, when the German submarine U-575 torpedoed the passenger ship that was being used as a troopship by the British government. The unescorted vessel sank at 11 PM Central European Time. Ulrich Boschwitz was just twenty-seven years old when his life—along with the lives of 361 other passengers—was extinguished. He was carrying his latest manuscript.
Several weeks earlier, he had sent what would be his last letter to his mother, Martha Wolgast Boschwitz, in which he spelled out what should be done with his published and unpublished manuscripts in the event of his death, including his novel The Passenger, which had come out in England in 1939 and in America the following year—only to quickly disappear. In this letter dated August 10, 1942, Ulrich Boschwitz informed his mother that he had thoroughly revised the book, and that she should expect to receive the first 109 pages of the corrected manuscript from a fellow former prisoner who was on his way to England. The remaining revisions were still pending.
The author advised his mother to engage someone with literary experience to incorporate the revisions, as he was convinced that the changes would greatly improve the book, and thereby increase its chances of being published in a Germany that would hopefully soon be liberated. Writing in English, he closed his notes with the words: “I really believe there is something in the book, which may make it a success.” Evidently Martha Wolgast Boschwitz never received her son’s revisions: in any case they are not included in the fragmentary “Ulrich Boschwitz Collection” currently housed in the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. Nor does his niece and closest relative, Reuella Shachaf, know anything about their whereabouts.
My first contact with Reuella Shachaf came as the result of an interview I gave in December 2015. Avner Shapira, literary critic of the Israeli daily Haaretz, had asked me to discuss Ernst Haffner’s 1932 novel Blood Brothers, which I had rediscovered and which had just come out in a Hebrew translation. After the interview appeared Reuella sent me an email, in which she mentioned her uncle from Berlin Ulrich Boschwitz, whose books had been published in several languages but never in his own native tongue. One book in particular, she wrote, might be of special interest—namely the 1938 novel Der Reisende, whose original German typescript was not with the remaining papers in New York, but since the late 1960s had been housed in Frankfurt, in the German Exile Archive of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. It all sounded so interesting that I traveled to Frankfurt a few days before Christmas 2015 and spent an entire day absorbed in the first and only original copy of the novel.
I quickly found myself riveted by the text, but it was also obvious that the typescript had never been edited, and that a proper editing would only enhance the book’s quality. Furthermore, because Ulrich Boschwitz himself had seen the necessity, and since as mentioned above he had continued to revise the text following its release in England and America, I decided to seek his family’s consent and edit the manuscript just as I would any other text I publish or edit—the only difference being that no exchange with the author would be possible.
But it was inside that little bare room in the otherwise impressively large Nationalbibliothek when I first followed the fate of Otto Silbermann, as he wandered aimlessly across Germany, frightened in the wake of the November pogroms, always in danger of being arrested or denounced. By the time I left the library late in the afternoon it was already dark, it was drizzling outside, and everything I took in as I walked back to my hotel near the train station seemed incredibly dreary and reinforced the enormous sadness I felt after reading the novel. Back in my room I began to refresh my knowledge of the events that occurred in Germany and Austria between November 7 and 13, 1938, and I set out to learn more about Ulrich Boschwitz, whose novel was likely the first literary account of these atrocities.
Today it has been amply documented that the excesses of violence were not the expression of spontaneous popular outrage that Joseph Goebbels claimed had spilled over because a Polish Jew had shot Eduard vom Rath, the third secretary of the German embassy in Paris, who died from his wounds two days later. The assassination carried out by the seventeen-year-old Herschel Grynszpan simply served as the pretext for members of the SA and SS—many disguised in civilian clothes—to set fire to synagogues and plunder Jewish businesses. It was a signal to begin the all-out systematic persecution of Jews, following years of a more piecemeal deprivation of rights.
A survey of the international press coverage of the pogroms reveals how little credence was given to the official pronouncements of the Nazi regime. In 1938 there were still a lot of foreigners in Germany, and journalists, embassy personnel, businessmen, as well as other eyewitnesses reported directly to their home countries. The outrage sparked by these accounts was universal, but it did not lead, as one might expect, to a greater willingness to help, by granting more Jews the possibility of immigrating abroad, for example. Quite the opposite.
Overnight it became clear to the Jews remaining in Germany that flight was the only way left to save themselves, but the doors were gradually closing. Legal immigration to European countries such as France, England, or Switzerland was practically out of the question for Jews. And obtaining visas for the United States or South American nations was virtually impossible—even apart from the horrendous costs that such a venture entailed. This is precisely the hopeless situation in which Otto Silbermann finds himself. But Ulrich Boschwitz was not only describing the trap into which hundreds of thousands of Jews in Germany had fallen, he was also writing in despair about his own fate, and incorporating some of his own family history.
His protagonist Otto Silbermann is a prosperous Berlin merchant of Jewish ancestry who considers himself very much a German. He had fought on the front lines in the First World War and had been awarded the Iron Cross, and prior to the Nazi takeover was considered a respectable member of Berlin’s middle class. Ulrich Boschwitz’s father, who died a few weeks before the birth of his son in 1915, was also a well-to-do merchant. His Jewish background, which would ultimately determine his family’s fate, had been of no importance before 1933. He had in fact converted to Christianity, and so Ulrich and his sister Clarissa grew up in a household shaped by Protestantism. Their mother, the painter Martha Wolgast Boschwitz, was descended from the Plitt family of Lübeck, whose members included various senators and influential theologians. Consequently the exclusion from society, the stigmatization and increasing persecution of the Jews—to which Ulrich and Clarissa Boschwitz were also subjected—came as a great shock.
After the Nazi takeover Clarissa Boschwitz deliberately embraced her Jewish roots and in 1933 fled Berlin on a night train to Switzerland. She joined the Zionist movement, and settled on a kibbutz in Palestine. Meanwhile Ulrich and his mother stayed in Germany until 1935, but immediately after the proclamation of the Nuremberg Race Laws they left the country and immigrated first to Sweden, and then in the following year to Oslo. There Ulrich Boschwitz wrote his first novel Menschen neben dem Leben (People Parallel to Life), which was quickly published by Bonnier in the summer of 1937 in a Swedish translation, under the pseudonym John Grane, and which received an enthusiastic reception in the Swedish press.
The success of that book enabled him to move to Paris, where he spent a few semesters studying at the Sorbonne. In The Passenger, Paris is also where Otto Silbermann’s son lives and where he tries unsuccessfully to obtain residency permits for his parents. Because this effort fails, Otto Silbermann attempts to cross out of Germany illegally and is captured by Belgian border guards. Evidently this scene, too, is drawn from the author’s life: Reuella Shachaf recalls family stories about how her uncle Ulrich Boschwitz was once detained by customs officials on the border of Luxemburg.
Many of the events in the novel can be linked to autobiographical or familial experience. As can the despair and hopelessness that overcame Otto Silbermann in the wake of the November pogroms. Boschwitz began writing The Passenger immediately after Kristallnacht, and finished the book in a feverish four weeks. An English version appeared in the spring of 1939 with the London publisher Hamish Hamilton under the title The Man Who Took Trains and in the following year Harper published the book in the USA as The Fugitive. Evidently Ulrich Boschwitz felt compelled to fight his own looming sense of powerlessness by writing, by bearing literary witness to the crimes being perpetrated in Germany and Austria—crimes that the world was treating with terrifying indifference or, at any rate, appalling inaction.
Boschwitz’s protagonist Otto Silbermann puts a face on the nameless victims. But he also mirrors the author’s own inner turmoil. Silbermann is not a completely sympathetic person—among other things he even scorns his fellow sufferers—nor are all the “Aryan” Germans he encounters as he vainly tries to outrun his fate bad people. He meets the most diverse archetypes of German society: those who bear active responsibility for the crimes being committed, fellow travelers, frightened people who duck and dodge, as well as courageous, empathetic individuals who offer assistance. This panorama informs his view of the country and the people to whom he still feels a sense of belonging.
Ulrich Boschwitz’s literary estate reveals a similarly tormented ambivalence to his native land, as can be seen in several poems penned in 1936. Lines such as: As long as there are German Germans, the country will again be free display a hopefulness that he had not yet abandoned. But there are also more bitter entries, such as “The Club of the Upright Citizens,” which begins:
True-blue eyes and trusty hands
double chins and strong broad chests
ready to receive commands
and march in good Germanic step
Another, entitled “The Legend of Joseph,” is devoted to Joseph Goebbels, and ends like this:
Joseph was a jobless hack
who scribbled here and there
and yet today—imagine that!
he is a millionaire.
Spreading his crippled soul’s infection
onto the German nation’s grand elite
he fashions history from fiction—
his work paid off—that’s no small feat!
These are all angry, if clumsy, attempts to express his contradictory feelings. There are also lines where he is clearly trying to buck himself up:
He who hopes will go on living
while he who sees no road ahead
has just given up his spirit
long before he’s met his death.
At that point Ulrich Boschwitz was twenty-one years old. A young man sitting alone in Paris, frantically writing as a way to counter the looming catastrophe. Death or Life—both options were equally likely, as he was very well aware. But before the curtain fell, fate had a few more twists in store for him, both terrible and absurd.
In 1939, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, Ulrich Boschwitz followed his mother into exile in England. Like practically all of the Germans who fled the Nazi regime, he and his mother were placed in internment—25,000 people on the Isle of Man alone. In July 1940, Ulrich Boschwitz was sent to an internment camp in Australia aboard the former troop transport Dunera. The ship was grossly overfilled; Jewish and political refugees were mixed in with German and Italian prisoners of war, and the conditions were catastrophic. In addition to the overcrowding, passengers were mistreated and robbed by the crew. The fifty-seven-day ordeal became an inglorious page in British history. Among the “Dunera Boys” were many Jewish intellectuals: one of Ulrich Boschwitz’s former fellow prisoners wrote a letter to Reuella Shachaf in which he described the important role that culture played in the prison camp.
After 1942, some internees were able to regain their freedom—first and foremost those who were willing to serve in the British army and fight against Nazi Germany. Ulrich Boschwitz hesitated for a long time, for fear of the war and of the long passage, perhaps also for other reasons we can no longer know. He wrote incessantly, confessing to a fellow prisoner that he was more afraid of losing his last manuscript than his life. Sadly, this final work of his perished aboard the Abosso in 1942. This makes the publication of The Passenger all the more noteworthy, as it gives readers around the world a chance to discover the author Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz—since its republication the book has been translated into nineteen languages.
I should note that this is not the first attempt to have the book published in Germany: we know for instance that it was turned down by Fischer Verlag. None less than Heinrich Böll—one of the most passionate advocates for a humane society and against forgetting—campaigned on its behalf, as can be seen in a letter preserved alongside the typescript and other documents in the German Exile Archive. Böll recommended the text to his own publisher. But even his endorsement wasn’t enough. Decades had to pass before this novel could appear in its original language. I thank Reuella Shachaf for alerting me to the text and for her trust in allowing it to appear in the present form. Now, decades after Ulrich Boschwitz died at sea, his novel is at last available to the descendants for whose grandparents and great-grandparents it was actually intended—the “German Germans” who remained committed to humanitarian ideals.
I am convinced that in revising the typescript I have proceeded with the utmost respect and in accordance with the underlying original version. And I want to believe I’m not mistaken in this judgment, and that I am able to present a version that allows all the qualities of this important work to come to light. Astoundingly serene and well-observed, Ulrich Boschwitz’s The Passenger is both an important literary testament from a dark chapter in human history as well as a timeless—and timely—plea for greater humanity.