Balliol College

Balliol College is the Oxford institution where Hugh Legat and Paul von Hartmann studied together and formed a friendship that later returned to the centre of Legat’s life. The novel gives the college its significance through that connection: a place associated first with student companionship and travel, then with a past that shadows their reunion during the European crisis of 1938.

The College and Its Students

Legat identifies himself and Paul as having been at Balliol College together. Paul was a Rhodes scholar, a detail Legat gives when officials ask whether he knows the man suspected of sending him a secret German military directive. Their shared education establishes a history between them that precedes the political danger surrounding the document.

The 1932 Journey

The college appears in Legat’s recollection of the summer of 1932, when he and Paul had finished their finals. After visiting Legat’s mother in Stow-on-the-Wold, they returned to Balliol. Paul proposed showing his friend countryside beyond what he called merely pretty, and said they could meet his girlfriend, who lived in Bavaria. The journey they planned grew out of their student friendship, but its timing brought them into a Munich unsettled by political demonstrations and Nazi rallies. The contrast between their Oxford routine and the upheaval they encountered makes the college a marker of a world they could not keep separate from politics.

A Past Reopened

Six years after the summer journey, Legat says he last saw Paul in 1932. At the 1938 conference in Munich, they meet again in circumstances far removed from their student life: Paul leads Legat through the city to the Park-Café, where he checks whether Legat has been followed. Balliol is not the setting of this reunion, but the remembered college connection explains why the meeting carries the weight of an old friendship rather than a purely official encounter. The institution’s role in the novel is therefore intimate and retrospective: it anchors the friendship’s beginnings while the events of 1938 test what remains of it.