BOSCHWITZ, A GERMAN Jew, got out of Germany in 1935, not long after the Nuremberg laws were passed, so he did not experience firsthand the post-Kristallnacht weeks of roundups, camps, and desperate attempts to flee in late 1938...this novel is so vivid and terrifying, though, that one would swear he did experience them.
The novel's main character, Otto Silbermann, is a successful German Jewish businessman, a World War I combat vet, and married to a gentile, but none of that is doing him the least bit of good as he tries again and again to get out of Germany before he is hauled off. He takes train after train, back and forth across the country, clutching a briefcase full of cash, not knowing whom he can trust or which encounter with a petty official might be his last as a free man. He even attempts to cross into Belgium on foot, at night...to no avail.
The modifier "Kafkaesque" keeps coming to mind, given the central European setting, the nightmare-like circularity and repetition, and the pervasive hostility and suspicion Silbermann has to navigate around. But then one recalls it's Germany, it's 1938, and there is nothing either fantastical or allegorical about the accelerating dwindling of Silbermann's chances of getting out.
The novel's most terrifying aspect is that the people Silbermann deals with gradually stop seeing him as really human at all. He is becoming Agamben's homo sacer.
Apparently the novel was published in the USA as early as 1939 and in the UK in 1940 without attracting much attention. Hats off to all involved in its rediscovery and republication.
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