Berlin Shuffle: A Novel
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Following the spectacular literary rediscovery of The Passenger, Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s debut novel is now being published for the first time in the US. Set in the eponymous city in the 1920s, Berlin Shuffle portrays the ordinary citizens who, after the war and the global economic crisis, have absolutely nothing to laugh about and yet continue to celebrate life.
Berlin in the early 1920s was the largest city in Europe, a cultural mecca, and a political mess. A hedonistic Babylon full of glitz, though there’s little glamour for the hundreds of thousands out of work—the war-wounded, the beggars and the prostitutes, the down-and-out and the demented. But come evening they, too, want to shed their cares at the Jolly Huntsman pub, where some come to drink, listen to the music, or dance.
But there’s always disaster lurking in the alleys and backrooms and flophouses, a disaster that twenty-two-year-old Ulrich Boschwitz clearly saw coming. In reality and story, this is the world of the Three Penny Opera, of M, of Berlin Alexanderplatz—the discontent that would feed the Nazi storm. Tragically the same storm would engulf the author, who perished at sea in 1942, one of many flames snuffed out by Germany’s war machine. This literary debut from 1937 is both a witness to a time and a testament to an amazing talent.
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Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz was born in Berlin in 1915. He left Germany in 1935 for Oslo, Norway, studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and wrote two novels, Lives Apart and The Passenger. Boschwitz eventually settled in England in 1939, although he was interned as a German “enemy alien” after war broke out—despite his Jewish background—and subsequently shipped to Australia. In 1942, Boschwitz was allowed to return to England, but his ship was torpedoed by a German submarine and he was killed along with 362 other passengers. He was twenty-seven years old.
Philip Boehm has translated more than thirty novels and plays by German and Polish writers, including Herta Müller, Franz Kafka, and Ida Fink. He has received fellowships from the NEA and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, as well as numerous awards, including the Wolff Translator’s Prize and the Ungar Award from the American Translators Association, among others. He also works as a theater director and playwright.
