I am rereading The Passenger by Alexander Boschwitz, which is to my knowledge the first fictional account of the events which led up to Kristallnacht.*
Alexander Boschwitz, wrote the book in 1939, and it details the experiences of Otto Silbermann a German Jew caught up in the growing nightmare of state sponsored antisemitism just before the Night of Broken Glass in 1938.
In an effort to evade arrest, Otto takes a series of train journeys from his home in Berlin across Germany.
In the course of which he encounters a cross section of the population, from rabid Nazi antisemites, to “regular” Germans getting on with their life, and minding their own business.
But there is no doubting the danger he is in, which at one point involves an attempt by an acquittance to cheat him out of the true value of his home, and by the actual appropriation of his business by his partner and long time friend.
Much of the book revolves around his own internal debate about whether he should have left Germany earlier, and the contradiction between those he meets who appear “decent” and those who at best are indifferent and those who are hostile.
And while he flips from despair to optimism that things can’t get any worse, there is also a sense of incredulity that in his own words “in the middle of Europe in the twentieth century” this could be happening.
Along with that observation is the chilling fact that he is trapped, because Germany won’t let him out and other countries won’t let him in. "For a Jew, the entire Reich has become one big concentration camp".
What I like about the book is that it offers up no easy key to how he should have acted when the Nazi’s first came to power.
Both he and his wife who is not Jewish found reasons not to leave.
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| Shop damage in Magdeburg, following Kristallnacht, 1938 |
Some rest on relatively trivial reasons, while others get to the heart of how most of us might react, balancing the antisemitic policies of the Nazi’s with measured judgements on how far the new Government would actually go, and indeed how long they would stay in power.
It is not an easy read, but it is fascinating one, which I suspect owes something to the translation, as to the subject matter.
And as a result, I read half the 256 pages in one sitting.
All of which is more poignant because Alexander Boschwitz saw the writing on the wall just two years after the Nazis seized power, and judging that the Nuremburg Laws were just the start, he and his mother left Germany, finally arriving in Britain just before the outbreak of the Second World War.
Being German, they were interned, and Alexander transported to Australia.
Later with the relaxation of control of who was interned, he was given permission to return to Britain, but his ship was torpedoed by a German U Boat and he perished along with the crew and his fellow passengers. He was twenty-seven years old.
Pictures; cover The Passenger, 2021, and Kristallnacht, shop damage in Magdeburg, 1938, from Kristallnacht, Wikiperdia, supplied by The German Federal Archive, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht
*The Passenger, Alexander Boschwitz, 1939, published by Pushkin Press 2021
