Hopeless cases, lowlifes and down-and-outs, the atmosphere in the extraordinarily talented Ulrich Boschwitz’s first novel feels like something from Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera
January 9, 2026 13:58
Ulrich Boschwitz was born in Berlin in 1915 to a Jewish father and a
Protestant mother. He left Germany in 1935, settled in Britain in 1939 and was killed in 1942 when the ship bringing him back to England from Australia was torpedoed by a German submarine.
His second novel, The Passenger, about a German Jew trying to escape from Nazi Germany, became a huge success when it was translated into English by Philip Boehm in 2021. Now Boehm has translated Boschwitz’s first novel, Berlin Shuffle, first published in German in 2019 as Menschen neben dem Leben.
It is very different from The Passenger, both in feel and content. The Passenger was set in Nazi Germany in the aftermath of Kristallnacht. The central character, Otto Silbermann, was a successful Jewish businessman, and the novel reads like a thriller, part-John Buchan, part-Hitchcock as Silbermann goes on the run. Berlin Shuffle, by contrast, is set in late Weimar Germany. There are no major Jewish characters and the atmosphere is more like something from Brecht’s Threepenny Opera or the dark paintings by Max Beckmann and Otto Dix. The main characters, mostly men, are hopeless cases, unemployed, beggars and pedlars, travelling salesmen, blind war veterans. They are lowlifes, down-and-outs. Life has passed them by. As Boschwitz writes on the opening page, “times were tough”. It is no coincidence that the opening pages are set in a dingy, damp cellar.
But perhaps the dominant theme is misogyny. The men treat the female characters appallingly. They don’t love the women or even like them. And as the book goes on, we meet more and more pimps and prostitutes.
As for the women, they settle for men like Sonnenberg, the violent and blind war veteran, because they can’t find anyone better. More disturbing still, is the sense of drunken violence and how it might erupt into something far worse.
The novel moves between a large cast of characters. Some have tragic back-stories. Tonnchen is a hopelessly obese imbecile who tags along with two ne’er-do-wells in search of food. Frau Fliebusch keeps expecting that her husband, who went off to fight in the war, will return even though it is clear that he was killed more than a decade ago
There’s a curious contrast between their shabby lives and the new modernity of Weimar Berlin, streetcars and the U-Bahn, dance halls, cinemas and taxis. Boschwitz has a good eye for this new urban world.
There are passing references to Hindenburg and Ludendorff, but little sense of the rising far right, even though it was first published (in Swedish translation) in 1937. But look closely, and you can see how this mounting resentment and violence will soon lead to the emergence of Nazism.
We owe a huge debt of thanks to Philip Boehm for his excellent translation and to Pushkin Press for championing such a talented writer. If he had survived the war, who knows what might have become of Boschwitz. His first two novels suggest he was an extraordinary talent in the making.
Berlin Shuffle
Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz
Pushkin Press
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