Audio installation “The Passenger”

Like Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s second book “The Passenger”, the artist collective Auricle (Berlin/London) has titled its immersive audio installation dedicated to the writer and his work. For 30 minutes, up to 16 guests take a seat in an improvised room. The playing area serves as an apartment, a street, a waiting room, a train compartment. The location is made clear by combining monologues and conversations from the book with noises, sound and light effects. This allows the listener to participate in the fate of the novel’s main character Otto Silberstein; the atmosphere of the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany becomes oppressively tangible. The narrators, especially well-known German actors Samuel Finzi, Bjarne Mädel and Maja Schöne, also contribute to this.

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz had begun a promising career as a writer. His first novel is about “people next to life” – who were socially marginalized after the First World War in the so-called Golden Twenties and still tried to celebrate their lives. Both novels were first published in German in 2018/2019.

“The Passenger” was written in the first weeks of his escape from the Nazis, which took the then 25-year-old Berliner and his mother to Sweden in 1935 and later to England. Both were interned there. In 1940, Ulrich Boschwitz was deported to Australia on the Dunera. In 1942, on his return journey to England, his ship Abosso was sunk by a German submarine. Ulrich Boschwitz was among the victims. Stumbling stones in Berlin-Wilmersdorf commemorate him and his mother.

The Berlin presentation was shown on the occasion of the Days of Exile 2023. It was an initiative of the Körber Foundation in cooperation with the Stiftung Exilmuseum Berlin.

Peter Dehn, in September 2023.