“The Passenger” back on stage

“The Passenger” by Ulrich Boschwitz is the subject of a new theatre work. László Bagossy staged his adaptation of the book and announces “an evening full of literary, theatrical and multimedia discoveries”. The play will premiere on 27 June 2024 at the tri-bühne Theater in Stuttgart. Further performances are scheduled for 28 and 29 June.

Manuel Krstanovic plays the lead role of Jewish merchant Otto Silbermann, who is thrown out of his middle-class life by the November pogrom and embarks on an aimless train journey through Nazi Germany. The play adapts how Silbermann finds himself on the sidelines in trains, on platforms, in station restaurants, etc. – in other words, within an environment that was thought to be familiar – and how a disillusioned man looks at good and bad people. Stephen Crane (set design), Renáta Balogh (costumes) and Sebastian Huber (musical direction) were involved in the production.

The novel, first published in Sweden in 1937 (under the pseudonym John Grane in Swedish), depicts this journey with great urgency. Berlin publisher Peter Graf rediscovered the forgotten writer and published Boschwitz’s two novels in German for the first time in 2018/2019.

About Ulrich A. Boschwitz

Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, born in Berlin in 1915, had to leave Germany as a Jew. His journey took him via Sweden and various other destinations to England. Due to the rampant xenophobia there, he was deported to Australia on the Dunera in July 1940. His mother was imprisoned on the Isle of Men. He was allowed to return in late summer. Shortly before reaching Liverpool, his ship, the Abosso, was sunk by a German submarine. Boschwitz drowned in the Atlantic at the age of just 27. Stumbling stones at Hohenzollerndamm 81 in Berlin commemorate him and his family.