Last year I was taken by Max-Otto Ludwig Löwenstein‘s wartime memoir, Accidental Journey. You may remember his family were rich Jews and he went to Cambridge before being sent round and about as an enemy alien and joining the British army.
Now I am reading The Passenger, a short novel by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz. He also fled Germany, to Oslo, and then went to the Sorbonne before joining his mother in England in 1939, where he wrote The Passenger. His novel is about the experiences of Otto Silbermann in 1938. He is living in Berlin, Jewish, married with a son, who has escaped to Paris, and is a successful businessman and property owner. The thoughts and extreme anxiety that flood through his head are what many of us would have thought at such a time. He had fought In the Great War, was a German perhaps more than a Jew and not a rule breaker.
Gradually he realises his life is in danger and counts for more than his money. He doesn’t know how to get across the border and runs around in fear and panic. It is a brilliantly written psycho-thriller in which the young author, born 1915, projects himself as the helpless son in Paris. A telling scene is when an Aryan friend visits his apartment and offers to buy it for 15,000 marks. Otto demands 30,000. They wrangle and during the acrimony the Nazis come to arrest him. His friend helps him escape through a back entrance as Otto says he will accept 10,000. That cinematic scene is a microcosm of what’s happening to Otto and Germany’s prosperous middle class Jews. “Only” a novel but a chillingly realistic description of one man’s choices and fears.
Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz was a good writer and mighty have gone on to even greater things but the fortunes of war put paid to that.
“When World War II broke out, Boschwitz and his mother were arrested by the British, classified as “enemy aliens”, and interned on the Isle of Man. In July 1940, Boschwitz was deported to Australia, where he was interned at a camp in New South Wales. On the voyage there, on the HMT Dunera, a crew member threw the only draft of his latest work, Das Grosse Fressen (The Big Feast), into the ocean.
In Australia, Boschwitz worked on revising a second edition of Der Reisende and began a new novel, Traumtage (Dream Days). In 1942, he was freed and allowed to return to Britain. On 29 October, the vessel he was on, MV Abosso, was torpedoed and sunk by the German submarine U-575. Boschwitz, aged 27, was one of the 362 people onboard who died. His last works died with him.” (Wikipedia)
Today’s New York Times carries an obituary of one Hessy Levinsons Taft, who at the age of six months had her picture on the Nazi magazine Sonne ins Haus, as the ideal Aryan baby. Her parents, Latvian Jews, were shocked, if also amused. The family got out and eventually settled in New York.