Passenger

It reminds me of Klemperer's "I Will Bear Witness."You, the reader, know how bad it's going to get yet you're powerless to do anything more than watch.

Great book about a Jewish man on the run in Germany in 1938 after Kristalnacht. He is constantly in doubt as to what to do and so just keeps taking trains and trying to think out a plan to get safe. Most difficult is coming to grips with how completely life has changed from what he knew. Written by a young man who lived in Berlin at that time and escaped.

The backstory of this book is devastating. The prose is clean, and the plot is nuanced and intelligent - albeit heartbreaking. The cover is lovely too, and it looks nice on a shelf.

Riveting. The story reads like a growing nightmare, threatening tentacles growing from every street corner, out of every building. Which way to turn, go back, don't go back. Watch every corner, every person's eyes. Until one becomes so confused, and resultingly delusional, and cannot discern between reality and the simple expectation that wiping away the growing horror will make things better. A lie constantly repeated makes people think, well?, if it's constantly being repeated, then? it's true? That is how a society comes apart at its seams.it is the horror that confronts the lead character in this book. A society that fails to see the underlying menace that spreads like a virus becomes infected by it, and it mutates and spreads. Nothing changes throughout the course of human history. The written account as the author envisioned it, this nightmare, in this book is as accurate as any living witness to the horrors of a political party's intent to eradicate an entire segment of society. It is the same viciousness, the same lie that permeates the present. Lies, intentional, to deceive and thereby enhance a political opportunism that is only self-serving. Yet, as it was in Nazi Germany, there is now the same kind of following, believing what they want to believe, rather than what is true and what is not true, listening to the very mindless political personalities that foment a gross distortion of reality to suit their own ends. It's the very lesson taught in the earliest school grades: How to distinguish truth and fact from lies and fiction.

I will read this book again; it immerses the reader into the fear and the insanity of Germany in 1938. The book moves as fast as the trains that Otto Silbermann takes in an attempt to escape the chaos that surrounds him.Otto meets various individuals on these trains, and each stop along the complex route of freedom that he travels causes him to explore various parts of his life. Otto's conversations with himself illumine the pressure of being on the run in a country that is no longer his home.Every train platform that Otto walks on poses a threat, while every corner that he turns leads to a climax that left this reader feeling heartbroken for him and all those who were passengers during that horrible time.

I didn't intend to read this right away, but I usually read the first few pages of a new book to get a feel for it. I couldn't put it down and read 70 pages in that first sitting. What makes the novel incredibly fascinating is that it was written during the Nazi period and wasn't a post-war reflection: the author died in 1942 and couldn't have been aware of the full extent of the Holocaust. Instead, he captures the horror of everyday life as a Jewish man in Nazi Germany and brilliantly illustrates how pervasive systematic racism can be.The translation is so smooth, too, that you'd think it was written in English.

Step into the shoes of a once wealthy and respected Jewish businessman who takes an endless journey on the German trains, that so famously run on time. His mind reels as every effort to escape the closing in of the Third Reich, and even to deny or comprehend its existence, fails, and the walls close in around him and cut off any escape. A psychological horror story, the worst of which is its reality, of man's inhumanity to man. Once I started this book, I was entirely gripped by it and read the entire work in a day. Such a huge tragedy also that this talented young writer did not live long enough to create more brilliant works that capture the zeitgeist of the second world war, and Nazi Germany.

This is a story of a Jewish businessman fleeing from Nazi persecution, but says a lot more about humanity and how we are quick to turn on family and friends in a crisis. I almost stopped reading after the 2nd chapter, I am glad I didn't since it turned out to be excellent book.

A frantic depiction of a man on the run in Nazi Germany in the immediate aftermath of the Kristallnacht pogrom. For several days in November 1938, the Jewish Otto Silbermann bounces around inside the cage that is Germany, trying in an unfocused way to escape across a border, then gradually giving up and subsiding into a form of hopeless madness. The pinball machine is the German train system -- Berlin to Dortmund, Dortmund to Hamburg, Hamburg to Munich, Munich to Hamburg.... Silbermann looks Aryan and so escapes apprehension for quite a long time. All the time, until it is stolen, he carries the enormous sum with him of RM41,000 in cash, and lives in panicky fear of its theft. This amount is itself the extortionately low price he realised for the sale of his business to his once-trustworthy Aryan partner.The truest thing about this book is the insidious way the Aryan population turns on, ostracises and condemns the Jewish minority: "If it were up to me, I could help you no problem, but...". There are exceptions, who Silbermann encounters as he runs, but he is by then probably too far gone in desperation to stop, listen and evaluate the coded offers of help that are given. Nothing uniquely German about all this; it would probably be true of any population under the heel of a terrorist, murderous regime -- and we all stand warned.The text, unsurprisingly, is a bit dated and the translation in places odd. If I had just received this on plain sheets of paper as a random passage of English, I would still know that it was German in original.Still, a very good book, of which the text was only rediscovered in 2016, written with fierce urgency by an author who was to die at 27. Is this some kind of allegory for Boschwitz's own life? In the end, the tale is bleak, so don't read The Passenger if you're looking for an emotional lift.

No work I've read on the Nazi era has the being-there immediacy of this almost-in-real-time, cinematic narrative, in which you are taken through a desperate, mostly railway tour of Nazi Germany in its barbaric new 'normality', by a fleeing Jewish protagonist who 'passes' for an Aryan. No atrocity is actually witnessed by him, yet feelings of horror, doom, and prophecy saturate every page. Boschwitz wrote the book at 23, from exile, and it is a colossal achievement. If you want to try and put yourself in the shoes of a German Jew after the pogroms of late 1938, this is going to be a real, empathic help. Beautifully written and translated, and easily read too. Please read this book.

Would I have done anything differently? Surely it would have been possible to simply hide or assume another identity? This book records the history of a man who's never had to run and hide in peacetime. He's Jewish but he's also very German. Even when his life depends on it, he is revolted by the thought of breaking rules. I've lived in Germany: they're still like that. Rules are to be followed. A compelling read.

It seems like everyone who reads this books loves it, and the praise from book reviewers is deafening. Allow me to offer a dissenting view.While the life story of the author is tragic and moving (a Jewish refugee from Germany who eventually lost his life in a U-boat attack), I did not find this book moving or believable.It tells the story of a German Jewish businessman who runs away from his home (and his non-Jewish wife) on the Kristallnacht in 1938 and then races across Germany by train. No one is pursuing him — indeed, no one seems to notice him — and he has no end goal in sight. He just goes from one city to another, back and forth. The one thing he sort-of tries, crossing the border into Belgium, is a non-starter. And that’s the whole story. Nothing else really happens.The central character is unappealing and uninteresting. His obsession about the money he carries with him, and the money he has lost, seems almost like a caricature of how Jews were portrayed by the Nazis. His indifference to the fate of his wife seems to play to that role as well.I was so hoping for a better book …

Beginning with Kristallnacht (November 1938), the novel follows the plight of Otto Silbermann, a businessman living through the November pogroms, who is helped to escape arrest by his protestant wife. The novel follows Otto through his emotional shifts as he tries, desperately, to reconnect with his family, his friends and previous associates whilst hiding in plain sight of anyone who might report him to the authorities. He spends days tavelling by train in an effort to get out of the country and many of the scenes are based on actual personal or familial experiences of the author.Although a novel, there are many autobigraphical similarities. The closeness of scenes in the book to the author's real life give the text an edge of nervousness that I, in my blissful and peaceful 21st century existance, can only partially understand. But the growing sense of desperation that Otto experiences is there on every page.As a character, I didn't particularly warm to Otto but then, when under such extreme duress, having lost everything, would any of us behave in a way that would encourage empathy? Probably not. Otto's shifts from absolute despair through to whimsical belief for a bright future in the Germany of 1938 were sometimes hard to read, but the inner workings of his mind were an insight into the daily terror that ordinary people had to face during that time.I found the writing style a little difficult at the outset, but it soon became very clear that the narrative voice employed was the only one that could fit such a story - a unique story that had to be told. I can thoroughly recommend this book as a fascinating view of a terrible time in our recent history.