A prophetic, darkly comic lost classic about down-and-outs in a fractured Berlin by the author of the Sunday Times bestselling rediscovery The Passenger

'A writer of great insight and talent' FT

Berlin, 1920s: a beacon of culture and hedonism, but a political mess. The streets are crowded with war veterans, beggars, prostitutes and madmen, desperately chasing any means to secure a few marks or a roof over their heads. Come nighttime, a rag-tag group descends on the Jolly Huntsman pub to dance and drown their cares in all the schnapps they can afford. But in this society on the brink, pleasure all too easily erupts into violence.

A bleakly comic story of struggle and discontent on the fringes of the metropolis, Berlin Shuffle is a blistering portrait of a divided society that would give way to fascism. Written when he was just twenty-two years old, Boschwitz's first novel displays his extraordinary talent for capturing Germany's self-destruction, which would tragically engulf him only five years later.



Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz was born in Berlin in 1915. He left Germany in 1935 for Oslo, Norway, studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and wrote two novels, including The Passenger. Boschwitz eventually settled in England in 1939, although he was interned as a German "enemy alien" after war broke out-despite his Jewish background-and subsequently shipped to Australia. In 1942, Boschwitz was allowed to return to England, but his ship was torpedoed by a German submarine and he was killed along with all 362 passengers. He was twenty-seven years old.Philip Boehm has translated over thirty novels and plays by German and Polish writers, including Herta Müller, Franz Kafka and Hanna Krall.



Highlights the author's exceptional talent for capturing the human experience of the political and economic disarray felt in Germany during the interwar years... The tension is ratcheted up brilliantly... A cautionary tale for our times



A cynical, funny account of down-and-out Berlin in the 1920s... lively... with a fittingly explosive conclusion



A tragicomic novel of down-and-out Berliners... Makes you wonder what a stellar career he might have had if his vagabond life hadn't been cut so brutally short... Unflinchingly honest, yet deeply humane



A story of misery, mayhem, madness and murder... The parallels with the present are frequently surprising... Presents a darkly funny anthropological study of what it is like to be one of the ordinary, little people trapped in an escalating social nightmare



The exhumation of Boschwitz is one of the more pleasing literary stories of recent times... Propulsive, dramatic... Steeped in foreboding... One could imagine Powell and Pressburger adapting it into a wonderful movie



Chilling and vividly portrayed . . . This clear-eyed novel from Boschwitz (The Passenger), who died in 1942, excavates the resentments of a broad cast of German characters as the country slides toward fascism. . . The plot threads are seamlessly stitched together. . . Profound



A welcome addition to Boschwitz's oeuvre. . . The book's greatest strength is showing, in day-to-day terms . . . an atmosphere in which a fascist government could arise. . . Many of the novel's concerns overlap with those of the present day



Praise for



Part John Buchan, part Franz Kafka and wholly riveting. It is also uncannily prescient [...] a gripping novel that plunges the reader into the gloom of Nazi Germany as the darkness was descending



There have been a number of great novels about the Second World War that have come to light again in recent times, most notably Suite Française and Alone in Berlin. I'm not sure that The Passenger might not be the greatest of them



Gripping and viscerally affecting



By turns claustrophobic, dizzying and symbolic, The Passenger is a work with sufficient pace to be a thriller, yet possessed of enough nuance and psychological depth to be of real literary weight



A writer of great insight and talent



A riveting, noirish, intensely filmic portrait... a jewel of a rediscovery: At once a deeply satisfying novel and a vital historical document



We owe a huge debt of thanks to Philip Boehm for his excellent translation and to Pushkin Press for championing such a talented writer. If he had survived the war, who knows what might have become of Boschwitz. His first two novels suggest he was an extraordinary talent in the making