Berlin Shuffle
A Novel
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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 during the Great Depression. Old man Sonnenberg was blinded during WWI. The beggar Fundholz, who had a normal life just a decade earlier, roams Berlin with dim-witted Tonnchen, gone mad from a tragic incident in his youth. There's also Minchen Lindner, now a mistress to a wealthy man after her bailiff father's fall from grace, and handsome Wilhelm Winter, who becomes a pimp out of economic necessity. The unemployed schizophrenic Grissmann was fired over misplacing 20 Reichsmarks several years before, while Frau Fliebusch still believes everyone is lying to her about her husband's death in the war. The plot threads are seamlessly stitched together by the end, when the characters converge at a raucous bar on the edge of Berlin full of others down on their luck and those preying off them. As schnapps flows freely, Wilhelm invites Minchen into a meeting with other pimps; then an argument between Grissmann and Sonnenberg turns tragic and sends the cast into a chilling and vividly portrayed frenzy. With profound insight, Boschwitz evokes a country's descent into madness.
