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German novel lost for 83 years has now made bestseller list

By June 7, 2021New Releases, News

A German novel lost for 83 years has made it onto the UK bestseller list.

The Passenger was written in 1938 by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz but then unfortunately forgotten for decades, only to be rediscovered by book lovers when the author’s niece mentioned it to an editor. It has since had excellent reviews, entering The Sunday Times list of top 10 hardback fiction bestsellers.

The novel follows a Jewish businessman, Otto van Silbermann, who attempts to escape the rise of the Nazi regime. It was written in the weeks following the violence against the Jewish people in Germany and Austria, named Kristallnacht, in 1938.

The story mirrors the author’s own experiences of fleeing Germany after anti-Semitic laws were brought in.

Boschwitz’s book was published in the US in 1939 and UK in 1940 but didn’t sell well and soon went out of print.

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz sadly died aged 27 after his boat was torpedoed by the Germans

After German editor Peter Graf wrote about another previously-lost book he had rediscovered, Boschwitz’s niece contacted him about her uncle’s forgotten novel which was being held in the National Library in Frankfurt.

As soon as the editor read the novel he “knew that this was important” and decided to edit and revise the book himself. Graf believes the book has a powerful message that is still relevant today.

“If you look at the refugee problem today, you see that the willingness to help people in need is low. And the more refugees there are, the less people are willing to help. This terrible and simple pattern runs through history,” he said.

“After the November pogroms in Germany, almost no country accepted Jews. They were trapped. And people who are assumed to leave their country only for economic reasons are even worse off in this respect than those who are persecuted.”

Graf added that the novel was essentially about “the disenfranchisement of a hitherto respected and well-off citizen”. He added: “Anyone who reads the fate of Otto Silbermann will understand a lot about human values and how terrorism and the lack of courage of the masses make terror against individual groups possible.”

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