Today it has been amply documented that the excesses of violence were not the expression of spontaneous popular outrage that Joseph Goebbels claimed had spilled over because a Polish Jew had shot Eduard vom Rath, the third secretary of the German embassy in Paris, who died from his wounds two days later. The assassination carried out by the seventeen-year-old Herschel Grynszpan simply served as the pretext for members of the SA and SS—many disguised in civilian clothes—to set fire to synagogues and plunder Jewish businesses. It was a signal to begin the all-out systematic persecution of Jews, following years of a more piecemeal deprivation of rights.

A survey of the international press coverage of the pogroms reveals how little credence was given to the official pronouncements of the Nazi regime. In 1938 there were still a lot of foreigners in Germany, and journalists, embassy personnel, businessmen, as well as other eyewitnesses reported directly to their home countries. The outrage sparked by these accounts was universal, but it did not lead, as one might expect, to a greater willingness to help, by granting more Jews the possibility of immigrating abroad, for example. Quite the opposite.

Overnight it became clear to the Jews remaining in Germany that flight was the only way left to save themselves, but the doors were gradually closing. Legal immigration to European countries such as France, England, or Switzerland was practically out of the question for Jews. And obtaining visas for the United States or South American nations was virtually impossible—even apart from the horrendous costs that such a venture entailed. This is precisely the hopeless situation in which Otto Silbermann finds himself. But Ulrich Boschwitz was not only describing the trap into which hundreds of thousands of Jews in Germany had fallen, he was also writing in despair about his own fate, and incorporating some of his own family history.

His protagonist Otto Silbermann is a prosperous Berlin merchant of Jewish ancestry who considers himself very much a German. He had fought on the front lines in the First World War and had been awarded the Iron Cross, and prior to the Nazi takeover was considered a respectable member of Berlin’s middle class. Ulrich Boschwitz’s father, who died a few weeks before the birth of his son in 1915, was also a well-to-do merchant. His Jewish background, which would ultimately determine his family’s fate, had been of no importance before 1933. He had in fact converted to Christianity, and so Ulrich and his sister Clarissa grew up in a household shaped by Protestantism. Their mother, the painter Martha Wolgast Boschwitz, was descended from the Plitt family of Lübeck, whose members included various senators and influential theologians. Consequently the exclusion from society, the stigmatization and increasing persecution of the Jews—to which Ulrich and Clarissa Boschwitz were also subjected—came as a great shock.