Berlin Shuffle

A prophetic lost classic from interwar Germany, following a group of Berliners navigating economic turmoil and the rise of fascism, now translated into English for the first time

Berlin in the 1920s is the largest city in Europe, a cultural mecca, and a political mess: a hedonistic Babylon, though there’s little glamour for the hundreds of thousands out of work, the war wounded, the prostitutes, and the beggars. Come evening they too want to shed their cares at the Jolly Huntsman pub, where they gather to drink, dance, and reassert their pride.

But there’s disaster lurking in the alleys and flophouses, a disaster that the twenty-two-year-old author Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz saw coming for his nation. In this dark comedy of petty theft, soapbox speeches, and bar fights is the disarray of a country devouring itself.

Tragically, Germany’s self-destruction engulfed the author, who was killed five years after finishing this novel. When Boschwitz’s The Passenger was rediscovered in 2021, it was heralded as a masterpiece that captured the terror of the Nazi reign. Now, Berlin Shuffle--his literary debut from 1937, finally available in English, with a preface by the preeminent translator Philip Boehm--brings to life the society that would enable fascism’s takeover.

The triumph of one of world literature’s spectacular talents, Berlin Shuffle is a dire warning sent from a pivotal moment in history to our own time.

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.