Hans Reiter—Hugo Halder

Hans Reiter—Hugo Halder is a formative friendship shaped by books, class difference, and complicity. At the Von Zumpe country estate, Halder becomes the first person to lead Reiter beyond a single reference book and into literary reading; Reiter, in turn, helps Halder conceal his thefts. The bond carries into Berlin, where their companionship takes the form of walks, cafés, and nights out, then becomes a separation Reiter tries unsuccessfully to overcome during the war. Its lasting importance lies in the way Halder gives Reiter both a literary education and an image of the self he might become, while their eventual distance leaves that early connection unfinished.

The Estate and the First Lessons

Halder’s visits to the country house gradually turn him into Reiter’s first friend. They spend time together shut in the library or walking and talking through the parkland around the estate. The difference between them remains visible: Halder is the baron’s nephew, while Reiter is a young servant whose reading has so far been confined to Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region. Their friendship develops within that unequal household, but conversation creates a space in which Reiter is treated as a mind to be addressed, not only as a worker.

Halder tests Reiter’s idea of what counts as a good book. Reiter names his reference volume; Halder distinguishes reference from literature by appealing to the beauty of a story and of the language telling it. To make the distinction tangible, he speaks of Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, Kleist, and Novalis, saying that he wept when rereading them. His insistence is emotional as well as instructional: literature is not merely information to be consulted but an experience capable of moving its reader.

The lesson does not proceed as a simple lecture. Reiter says that voids cannot be filled, while Halder argues that effort can fill what is empty and describes reading Goethe and other writers alongside the study of history. As dusk falls, the two disagree over which book Reiter should begin. Halder finally leaves the choice to him, asking him to return a book in a week. The small decision gives Reiter room to choose for himself, even as Halder has opened the field of possibility.

Parzival and the Image of a Self

Reiter chooses Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival. Halder smiles at the choice: he doubts Reiter will understand it, yet says he is not surprised, because the book is perfect for him. He sees Wolfram as the writer in whom Reiter may find the clearest resemblance to his own inner being, or to what he aspires to be, while warning that Reiter may never fully become that person. The closeness Halder signifies with thumb and forefinger—only a fraction of an inch—makes the comparison both intimate and elusive.

Reiter does understand the poem, and likes it. He reads it from beginning to end, sometimes aloud in the fields or along the path home from work. What delights him is the image of Parzival riding in a madman’s garb beneath his armor. Halder’s account of Wolfram gives that image a particular charge: Wolfram is described as a lay, independent knight, without lands and therefore dependent on protectors, who claims to have fled the pursuit of letters and to be untutored in the arts. Reiter is drawn to the pride and mystery of a figure who stands apart from courtly and clerical expectations. The book thus becomes more than the first literary work Halder recommends; it gives Reiter a vocabulary for imagining independence and difference.

Complicity and the Berlin Friendship

Their intimacy also acquires a practical, compromised form. Halder begins stealing objects from the estate, attributing the thefts to gambling debts and obligations to ladies he is duty-bound to assist. Because he is clumsy at concealing what he takes, Reiter helps him devise a way to make the missing things less noticeable: servants can rearrange rooms, empty them under the pretext of airing them, and move trunks between the cellar and the house. Reiter also helps Halder concentrate on old, overlooked possessions, including family antiques, ceremonial objects, silver-handled walking sticks, and swords associated with the family’s earlier wars.

The thefts continue at varying speeds until little remains that can be taken without attracting notice. Only once does the baron arrive, in a black sedan with its curtains drawn, and stay for a night. Reiter hopes the man might speak to him, but the baron roams the neglected wings in silence, eats black bread and cheese, chooses his own wine from the cellar, and leaves at dawn. Halder’s ease with Reiter does not extend to his cousin’s daughter: whenever she visits with friends, Halder becomes so ill at ease that he packs and departs. When Reiter asks why, Halder says he would not understand. Their shared walks through the forest have enclosed a kind of complicity, but there are boundaries in Halder’s life that he will not explain.

After leaving the estate, Reiter has more free time and visits Halder in Berlin. Halder lives in a small flat on a backstreet near Himmelstrasse, crowded with old furniture and dusty paintings. Their friendship now includes Noburo Nisamata, Halder’s Japanese friend, whom they call Nisa. The three meet at the Stone Virgin Cafe near Alexanderplatz, eat, and then move into the Berlin night. Halder leads them by taxi to the Eclipse, where the poor performers and noisy audience make an out-of-the-way table useful for conversation; later they go to the Cafe des Artistes, where Nisa enjoys encountering figures from the Reich’s art world. These evenings extend the earlier estate companionship into a social world of artists, cafés, and urban movement, with Halder acting as guide.

Wartime Separation and the Search

The war interrupts that shared life. While posted in Romania, Reiter receives two leaves and uses them to visit his parents. On the way to the village he also goes to Berlin, but cannot find Halder. The former flat has been taken by a civil-servant family, and its head, a party member, says curtly that he does not know where the previous tenant went. One of the daughters follows Reiter down the stairs and says she knows where Halder lives, but the information comes through an unsettling encounter rather than a straightforward reunion. When Reiter later asks her again for Halder’s address, she tells him Halder lives in Paris, without knowing or giving the address.

The search takes place against the grim conditions of Reiter’s wartime leave. At home he spends long stretches with his ten-year-old sister Lotte, whose devotion makes him laugh and saddens him, while thoughts of meaninglessness and death press on him. He does not find Halder in Berlin, and the Paris address offers no practical route to him. Reiter’s eventual indifference when he asks again does not erase the friendship; it marks the limit of what he can recover. Halder has been an early friend, a literary guide, and a partner in wrongdoing, but by the time Reiter seeks him out, their shared world has become a memory without a confirmed reunion.

The Relationship’s Lasting Shape

Halder’s influence is neither a clean apprenticeship nor a simple friendship between equals. He introduces Reiter to literary beauty and helps him encounter Parzival as a book capable of reflecting an aspiration, yet he also draws him into the concealment of theft. Reiter is not merely a pupil: his practical ingenuity helps Halder continue the pilfering, and his own response to Wolfram’s independence exceeds Halder’s initial prediction that he will not understand the poem.

The relationship’s arc moves from repeated meetings at the estate, through the shared intellectual and criminal life of Berlin, to separation and a fragmentary report of Halder’s location in Paris. The war gives that disappearance its larger pressure, but the evidence does not provide a reunion or explain what becomes of their friendship afterward. What remains is a formative connection defined by transmission and absence: Halder gives Reiter books and an image of independence, while Reiter’s later search reveals how little of that early companionship can be reclaimed.