In November 1938, author Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, who was living in Brussels at the time, began writing his novel “Der Reisende” (The man who took trains) under the profound influence of the news of the November pogroms. He finished it just a few weeks later. The novel tells the story of Jewish merchant Otto Silbermann from Berlin, who becomes an outcast after the November pogroms. Vilified, dropped by friends and business partners, he travels the length and breadth of Germany by train in a desperate search for a safe haven. His attempts to flee abroad are thwarted by an anti-Semitic bureaucracy which is hostile to refugees. Silbermann is turned back time and time again, and eventually loses his mind.

An English translation of the novel was published in the UK (1939) (The man who took trains) and USA (1940) (The fugitive) under the pseudonym “John Grane”. A French version was published posthumously in France in 1945 (Le fugitif). The typescript shown here is the only transcript of the German original still in existence. It came into the collection of the German National Library’s German Exile Archive 1933–1945 at the beginning of the 1960s. The white label marked “Submitted b[y]” on the cover page testifies to the efforts made by the executor of Boschwitz’s will to find a publisher for the first German-language edition. Heinrich Böll also championed Boschwitz’s work. However, his efforts were to be in vain. “Der Reisende” (The man who took trains) was not published in Germany until 2018.

Further reading:
Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz: Der Reisende. Roman. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta 2018.