From Stuttgart to Exile
ReunionHans’s life moves from deep belonging in Germany through expulsion and professional success in America to a belated encounter with his unresolved past.
increasing
Bearing strength in each event
decreasing
Bearing strength in each eventdecreasingA Secure Childhood
A Secure Childhood
A familiar home
Hans grows up in a comfortable household among books, collections, and the cultural traditions of Stuttgart.
Belonging taken for granted
His family considers itself German first and Jewish by ancestry. That certainty shapes the shock of later exclusion.
A Life Enlarged
A Life Enlarged
Shared discovery
Konradin’s friendship gives Hans a companion for travel, literature, art, and philosophical debate.
An imagined future
The boys treat their lives as open possibilities. Their confidence belongs to a peaceful world already beginning to fracture.
Departure for America
Departure for America
A protective decision
With antisemitism intensifying, Hans’s parents arrange for him to leave Germany and join relatives in New York City.
Youth cut short
Hans departs on his birthday, abandoning home and friendship under pressure. His departure begins the long displacement that defines his adult life.
Success Without Fulfillment
Success Without Fulfillment
A conventional career
Hans studies law at Harvard University, becomes a lawyer, marries, and acquires material security.
The abandoned vocation
He still regards himself as a failed poet. Achievement cannot replace the creative life he once imagined or the home he lost.
The Past Returns
The Past Returns
A memorial appeal
A roll of fallen classmates reaches Hans unexpectedly, disturbing the distance he has built from Germany.
A final answer
He opens the names he had avoided and learns Konradin’s fate. The discovery gives the past an ending without healing its damage.
Before February 1932, in Stuttgart
Spring and summer 1932, during the friendship
January 19, after Hans’s parents decide to send him away
By Hans’s twenty-fifth year and the following decades
Thirty years after Hans’s arrival in America
