Jewish shops have been ransacked and looted, synagogues destroyed. As storm troopers pound on his door, Otto Silbermann, a respected businessman who fought for Germany in the Great War, is forced to sneak out the back of his own home. Turned away from establishments he had long patronized, and fearful of being exposed as a Jew despite his Aryan looks, he boards a train.And then another. And another . . . until his flight becomes a frantic odyssey across Germany, as he searches first for information, then for help, and finally for escape. His travels bring him face-to-face with waiters and conductors, officials and fellow outcasts, seductive women and vicious thieves, a few of whom disapprove of the regime while the rest embrace it wholeheartedly.Clinging to his existence as it was just days before, Silbermann refuses to believe what is happening even as he is beset by opportunists, betrayed by associates, and bereft of family, friends, and fortune. As his world collapses around him, he is forced to concede that his nightmare is all too real.Twenty-three-year-old Ulrich Boschwitz wrote The Passenger at breakneck speed in 1938, fresh in the wake of the Kristallnacht pogroms, and his prose flies at the same pace. Taut, immediate, infused with acerbic Kafkaesque humor, The Passenger is an indelible portrait of a man and a society careening out of control.

    

    and these are fortifed in this connection by a traditional loyalty of service to a master, to whom the civil servant stands in a relation of personal stewardship. -from "Economic Policy of the Imperial State" One of the great thinkers of the early 20th century, American economist and sociologist THORSTEIN BUNDE VEBLEN (1857-1929) is best remembered for coining the phrase "conspicuous consumption" and, in this 1915 work, explaining how the stage was set for something like the Third Reich in Germany decades before its appearance. Veblen describes: . how the pagan past of the Germans gave rise to their modern character . how Germany's appropriation of industrial technology limited its cultural growth . how a medieval perspective endured in Germany into its imperial era . how the dominance of Prussia impacted Germany as a whole . and more. ALSO FROM COSIMO: Veblen's The Vested Interests and the Common Man, The Theory of Business Enterprise, and An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation