Bryan Karetnyk

Hitting the buffers: The Passenger, by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, reviewed

When Otto Silberman is stripped of all right to exist, he takes to the railways to dodge the Nazis in this tense, nightmarish novel of 1938

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz. Credit: Archive of the Leo Baeck Institute 
issue 15 May 2021

‘They’ll slowly undress us first and then kill us, so our clothes won’t get bloody and our banknotes won’t get damaged.’ These words, spoken by Otto Silbermann in Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s The Passenger, are startling. Not because they so perfectly articulate the obscene ethos of Auschwitz but because they were written several years before the fact.

Composed in 1938, after its author had escaped the more murderous developments of Hitler’s regime, The Passenger is a tense, nightmarish account of one Jewish man’s attempt to survive in a country that is systematically stripping him of his right to exist. Initially blind to the dangers around him, Silbermann, a respectable businessman, suddenly finds his familiar environment transformed into a perilous hunting ground when a group of brownshirts come pounding on his door. Having given them the slip, he adopts an unlikely stratagem: to turn himself into a moving target and take to the Reichsbahn.

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