These books explore the idea that books can be much more than just inanimate objects. They can take on a transformative role in a story, transporting characters to magical places, inspiring us, and shaping the world itself.
Disregarded when first published in 1939, a story of a man fleeing the Nazis made it onto UK bestseller lists 82 years later. Here's how the novel was uncovered.
The Passenger : how the forgotten Nazi-era novel became a bestseller
Disregarded when first published in 1939, a story of a man fleeing the Nazis makes it onto UK bestseller lists 82 years later. Here s how the novel was uncovered.
Synagogues and Jewish property was damaged on the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938
The Passenger, a 1938 novel written by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, tells the story of businessman Otto Silbermann, who flees Berlin immediately after the Kristallnacht anti-Jewish pogrom; many of his Jewish friends have already been arrested by the Nazis. He takes trains through Germany, yet he never manages to leave the country.
The author of the novel, whose father was Jewish and mother Protestant, actually fled Nazi Germany in 1935, heading first to Sweden, then Norway and later England. That was shortly after the antisemitic and racist Nuremberg Laws were enacted on September 15, 1935. Boschwitz s father had already died during the First World War, and