Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler is a recurring but mostly indirect presence in Hans Schwarz’s account: first glimpsed in a photograph, then invoked through political rhetoric and Konradin von Hohenfels’s account of meeting him, and finally connected to the persecution that takes Hans’s parents’ lives. The character is built less through direct scenes than through the widening consequences of belief in his leadership. For Konradin, Hitler comes to embody a hoped-for national renewal; for Hans, the regime associated with him turns friendship, belonging, and family history into sources of danger and loss.

Identity and First Appearances

During Hans’s visit to the Hohenfels home, he notices a framed photograph in a bedroom that seems almost to resemble Adolf Hitler. The image shocks him, but he immediately decides he must be mistaken: he cannot imagine why a photograph of Hitler would be in a Hohenfels bedroom. The moment establishes Hitler’s presence as a question before it becomes an acknowledged political fact. The photograph is not identified with certainty, and Hans has no time to inspect it further.

Hitler also enters the story through the school’s changing atmosphere. Public life has become difficult to ignore even within the school’s traditional routines: posters denounce Jews and the Treaty of Versailles, swastikas appear on walls, and unemployed people process through the streets. Herr Pompetzki, a new history teacher, introduces a racialized account of history that celebrates Aryan influence and describes unnamed, supposedly hidden forces as undermining national life. He does not name those forces, but Hans and the other students understand the insinuation. Hitler is not identified as the speaker behind this lesson; rather, the scene shows how the political climate that will elevate him is made present in the classroom through coded claims and racial mythmaking.

Konradin’s Encounter and Political Allegiance

The clearest account of Hitler as a person comes in a letter from Konradin to Hans after Hans has left Germany. Konradin says that he met Hitler in Munich while there with his mother. He describes him as unimpressive in appearance, but says that listening to him was compelling because of his conviction, will, intensity, and apparent insight. Konradin reports that his mother left the meeting in tears, convinced that Hitler had been sent to the country. The letter presents their reactions as Konradin remembers them; it offers no independent account of the meeting.

Konradin’s letter makes clear that his admiration has become political commitment. He believes Hitler alone can rescue Germany from what he calls materialism and Bolshevism, and restore the moral authority the country has lost. He frames the choice as one between Stalin and Hitler, and says that he prefers Hitler. His certainty is striking because it follows his earlier admission that his mother hates Jews and fears that Hans has influenced her son. The same letter that expresses sorrow at Hans’s departure therefore reveals how readily Konradin’s personal attachment to Hans coexists with support for a political future that excludes him.

That exclusion is not presented as an abstract possibility. Konradin tells Hans that, for a time, there will be no place for him in the new Germany, although he imagines that Hans might return later. He also believes Hitler can distinguish between Jewish people he regards as desirable and undesirable. The hope of a later welcome depends on a discriminatory judgment that denies Hans security in the present. Konradin’s affection and political faith pull in different directions, but the letter does not resolve that contradiction: his sympathy for his friend does not prevent him from endorsing the power that marks Hans as conditionally acceptable.

Political Language and Its Consequences

The school episodes show the distance between historical instruction and events unfolding outside the classroom. Pompetzki’s lesson claims that racial inheritance explains the rise of civilizations and casts unnamed enemies as threats to national morals and heritage. Afterward, students challenge the argument by pointing to other civilizations, including those of China, the Arabs, and the Incas. Their objections expose the narrowness of the lesson, but Hans does not join the discussion. The episode matters to Hitler’s portrayal not because the teacher explicitly names him, but because it depicts an environment in which racialized political claims can circulate as history.

When Hans confronts Bollacher after being told to return to Palestine, Pompetzki dismisses the antisemitic insult as friendly advice and tells the boys to resume the lesson. His response turns hostility toward Hans into something treated as ordinary and even acceptable. The teacher then assures Bollacher that their problems will soon be solved. Hans waits after school, hoping Konradin will be there to support or comfort him, but finds the street empty. He subsequently avoids Konradin and becomes increasingly isolated. These scenes connect the political climate to immediate changes in Hans’s daily life without suggesting that Hitler personally appears in them.

Persecution, Family Loss, and Narrative Legacy

Years later, Hans recalls the persecution of his parents. A Nazi is stationed outside his father’s surgery with a notice warning Germans away from Jews. Hans’s father responds by wearing his officer’s uniform and decorations, including the Iron Cross, First Class, and standing beside the notice. The crowd initially watches in silence, then begins to jeer at the Nazi, who eventually leaves. He does not return and is not replaced. The incident briefly reverses the expected public spectacle: the man assigned to intimidate is driven away, while Hans’s father asserts his place in German society through the uniform and decorations he earned.

That public act does not protect Hans’s parents from what follows. A few days later, while his mother is asleep, his father causes both their deaths by suicide. Hans explicitly distinguishes their fate from deportation to Belsen, but their deaths remain inseparable from the persecution surrounding them. Afterward, he avoids meeting Germans and stops opening German books, even those by Hölderlin, trying to forget. His father’s protest, his parents’ deaths, and Hans’s refusal of German language and literature give the regime’s exclusions a lasting private consequence.

Hitler’s final appearance in the account is not a scene of action but an entry Hans reads in a book. Hans has considered tearing the little volume apart, then opens it at the letter H. The entry identifies Konradin as implicated in the plot to kill Hitler and records that he was executed. This discovery changes the meaning of Konradin’s earlier political allegiance: the friend who once believed Hitler could save Germany is ultimately condemned for involvement in a plot against him. Hitler remains largely outside the frame as a speaking character, yet the narrative’s key losses gather around the power attached to his name—exclusion from Germany, the destruction of Hans’s family, and Konradin’s execution.