... stunning ... There is no artifice to the writing ... The novel is remarkable precisely because of the immediacy of its plot—its sense of being written in a continuous present. Boschwitz, who was twenty-three when he finished it, was able to capture what happens when a regime turns on its own citizens and treats them as pariahs, with savage force and daily degradations dressed up in legalese. He had an ear for dialogue and a penchant for the absurd ... Boschwitz’s novel pulsates with such fine, understated descriptions ... One comes away marveling not only at Boschwitz’s craftsmanship but at what can only be called his human spirit: a sense of emotional restraint and the eerie foresight it took to produce this kind of work ... The Passenger exposes the posturing of bystanders who claimed not to have known what the Nazis were doing. Here, at least, we have one example of someone who did know ... The Passenger resembles a message in a bottle: cautionary, despairing, a literary warning ... Certain passages seem specifically designed to chill a present-day reader ... What other brave, urgent works likewise fell into obscurity because of the war?
... superbly translated ... We can be grateful to everyone involved. The Passenger is a riveting, noirish, intensely filmic portrait of an ambivalent fugitive ... The book is urgent, propulsive, often tragicomic, peppered with moments of absurdism and existential speculation, by turns Hitchcockian and Beckettian. It has the immediacy of a novel written in a hurry. But if the original was disordered, this new version is cohesive and beautifully paced ... With great verisimilitude, Boschwitz paints the portrait of a man riven with indecision and well-mannered panic as his options fall away ... Boschwitz is particularly good on the tussle between the new logic and the old order ... a jewel of a rediscovery: At once a deeply satisfying novel and a vital historical document—likely the first literary account, as Mr. Graf writes in his afterword, of Kristallnacht and its repercussions. Through the eyes of Otto Silbermann, we are thrust into the moment when politically legislated persecution tips into full-scale existential assault, our protagonist’s bewilderment morphing into terror and defiance as he tries to convince himself that the situation will surely get better.
Compelling though the real-life tale is, it’s surpassed by the story between the covers ... a story that is part John Buchan, part Franz Kafka and wholly riveting...It is also uncannily prescient ... Boschwitz was a shrewd observer of his time, but his story still resonates nearly a century later when antisemitism is on the rise once more and the exclusion of those who are different remains a pernicious constant across the globe. Besides, some of his insights are timeless ... a gripping novel that plunges the reader into the gloom of Nazi Germany as the darkness was descending. It deserved to be read when it was written. It certainly deserves to be read now.
... harrowing ... a major literary event ... offers an intimate portrait of Jewish life in prewar Nazi Germany at the onset of dehumanization, before the yellow star was imposed. What remains unsettling is how Boschwitz renders the mentality of Germany’s deeply assimilated Jews, who felt more German than Jewish, but ultimately understood the Nazis’ plans and sought to escape a horrific fate ... Boschwitz’s achievement is even more remarkable in light of his biography ... Boschwitz’s own story and devastating novel speak to the present — they are uncanny prophecies of our own time marked by the degradation of humanity in flight, searching for a place to call home.
... has been efficiently translated into English by Philip Boehm (who has done much harder things much better) ... Conditioning by the genre — and some historical knowledge of the 1930s — makes us impatient with Silbermann, who doesn’t have a plan, doesn’t keep a cool head, doesn’t discover in himself unexpected resources. It also perhaps makes us unable to cope with the world as is, where the law is broken with impunity, even to applause ... a gripping if occasionally annoying read. It is the work of a very young man, both urgent and perishable, and written at some remove from the events and atmospheres it describes. There is no iron logic defining its scenes or their sequence. We rarely think: 'Yes! This is it!' Tension washes in and out. There is a naïve and rather uncomfortable gap between the third-person narrative and the interior protocol of Silbermann’s consciousness. It is perhaps too much to hope for a masterpiece from the circumstances of its retrieval ... It is also, strangely, not a vivid book. There is very little in the way of speaking detail ... doesn’t have the courage of its schema, either: It could have been an absurdist book, a poetic parable, in which the character has given up on himself, and is existentially negotiating his final days, preferring the train to stationary life, and preferring the restaurant car to the other carriages. One can only imagine what Orwell or Camus might have done with such a setup ... At its best, The Passenger works as an invitation to the reader to be his own Otto Silbermann. The book relies on its situation, its frantic times, which we can easily gain access to with our own imaginations, without Boschwitz’s frail guard rails. But it’s easier, of course, to grasp the full potential of history after the fact, than to do so while living its events, tossed by its waves.
Boschwitz’s tale trembles with tension and eerily anticipates the central role the German train system would later play in the horrific logistics of the Holocaust. In a new translation, this remains a potent and uniquely rendered work of witness.
... uncanny ... His bleak reflections on his endless journey are contextualized by scathing observations of Aryan Germans, who sometimes offer mild sympathy but ultimately seem to find the concentration camps 'rather novel and quaint.' This chilling time capsule offers a startling image of fascism taken hold.
