Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz was born in Berlin in 1915. He fled Germany in 1935 and wrote his novels while studying at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1939, he settled in England, but after the war broke out, England interned him as an "enemy alien"--despite his Jewish background--and shipped him to Australia. In 1942, Boschwitz was allowed to return to England, but his ship was torpedoed by a German submarine, and he was killed at the age of twenty-seven.

Philip Boehm has translated more than thirty novels and plays by German and Polish writers, including Herta Müller, Franz Kafka, and Hanna Krall. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, as well as numerous awards, including the Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize and the Ungar German Translation Award from the American Translators Association. He also works as a theater director and playwright.

"A cautionary tale for our times . . . It highlights the author's exceptional talent for capturing the human experience of the political and economic disarray felt in Germany during the interwar years. . . . The tension is ratcheted up brilliantly in Philip Boehm's expert translation from the original German text. . . . The narrative builds slowly to an awful crescendo."
--Financial Times, Named a Best Book of the Week

"An unflinchingly honest, yet deeply humane portrait of a society floundering in the wake of the 1929 economic crisis, not to mention the unhealed wounds of the Great War."
--The New York Times

"Evocative . . . Powerful . . . Darkly funny . . . This is a story of misery, mayhem, madness and murder . . . sustained by its brilliant character descriptions and wry asides. . . . The parallels with the present in Berlin Shuffle, which was published in Germany in 1937, are frequently surprising."
--The Times (UK)

"A cynical, funny account of down-and-out Berlin in the 1920s . . . Despite the characters' grim circumstances, this is a lively book, light on its feet . . . and with a fittingly explosive conclusion."
--The Guardian

"Chilling and vividly portrayed . . . This clear-eyed novel from Boschwitz (The Passenger), who died in 1942, excavates the resentments of a broad cast of German characters as the country slides toward fascism. . . . The plot threads are seamlessly stitched together. . . . Profound."
--Publishers Weekly

"[An] omi-nous vision of pre-Nazi Ger-many--a Ger-many that would trag-i-cal-ly ful-fill Boschwitz's pre-dic-tion"
--Jewish Book Council

"A guide to human suffering . . . leavened with flashes of humor, examples of the famous Berliner Schnauze, coarse wit. Readers will occasionally laugh out loud. . . . Boschwitz adeptly juggles pathos and punches, verbal or otherwise."
--On the Seawall

"A welcome addition to Boschwitz's oeuvre. . . The book's greatest strength is showing, in day-to-day terms . . . an atmosphere in which a fascist government could arise. . . . In that sense, many of the novel's concerns overlap with those of the present day."
--Kirkus

Praise for Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz

"Stunning . . . Clairvoyant . . . One comes away marveling not only at Boschwitz's craftsmanship but at what can only be called his human spirit."
--Ruth Margalit, The New York Review of Books

"A writer of great insight and talent."
--Adam LeBor, Financial Times

"Uncannily prescient . . . It's as if Boschwitz foresaw the complicity of the millions who were bystanders to the wickedness that took place right in front of them."
-Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian

"What Boschwitz saw clearly enough was the utter despoliation of one's identity, of one's trust in the world, and ultimately of one's very humanity."
-André Aciman

"An author who might have become a household name."
-Toby Lichtig, The Wall Street Journal