With countless Afghans trapped by an extremist regime in a country where they no longer fit, the recent release of a new English edition of Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s powerful, angry, and unsettling The Passenger (Der Reisende) was undeniably timely.1
Boschwitz was a German in a period when it was necessary to have parents who passed a malign muster. His mother was a Protestant, as was his late father, Salomon, a successful businessman who had fought in the trenches. In the Third Reich this was not enough. Salomon had been born Jewish. Under the Nazi Nuremberg laws, that meant that Ulrich was “mixed race” (a Mischling, in the insulting terminology of the time). He was still entitled to German citizenship, but for how long? Realizing where things were going and facing the perverse prospect of being drafted into the Wehrmacht, Boschwitz quit Germany and, after stints elsewhere in Europe, made it to the United Kingdom shortly before the outbreak of war.
Horrified by Kristallnacht, he wrote the first draft of The Passenger, his second novel, in four weeks.
Horrified by Kristallnacht, he wrote the first draft of The Passenger, his second novel, in four weeks. It was published first in Britain in 1939 (as The Man Who Took Trains). Interned as an “enemy alien,” an ironic fate he shared with many other refugees from Hitler, first on the Isle of Man and then in Australia, Boschwitz was eventually reclassified