Antisemitic Confrontation at the Karl Alexander Gymnasium

The Antisemitic Confrontation at the Karl Alexander Gymnasium turns political hostility into a direct schoolroom encounter for Hans Schwarz. A new history teacher’s racialized account of the past helps change the atmosphere; Bollacher then targets Hans with antisemitic propaganda, and the teacher’s response makes clear that the school will not protect him. The confrontation ends not with reconciliation but with Hans isolated, his friendship with Konradin von Hohenfels fractured by silence, and his family preparing to send him away.

Background: Politics Enter the School

Earlier, Stuttgart had seemed largely untouched by the political unrest reported from Berlin. Minor incidents had occurred, but the city’s ordinary routines continued: restaurants, the Opera, and cafés were busy, and families discussed summer travel. Hans and Konradin von Hohenfels regarded politics as an adult concern, while their conversations turned to how to live and what purpose life might have. That apparent distance makes the later schoolroom hostility a reversal rather than a continuation of an openly acknowledged conflict.

By the time the confrontation approaches, the streets offer a harsher picture. Large posters denounce the Treaty of Versailles and Jews; swastikas and Communist symbols appear on walls, while unemployed people march through the city. Inside the school, however, established tradition still seems to hold time in place. The separation between street and classroom proves fragile: political slogans enter the school not only as opinions but as a new measure of who belongs.

Herr Pompetzki, a new history master from the region between Danzig and Königsberg, arrives in mid-September. His clipped Prussian speech stands out among boys accustomed to the broad Swabian dialect. He begins by dividing history into what students have already learned and a supposedly concealed history shaped by shadowy forces. Without naming Jews directly, he describes an account in which Aryan arrivals supposedly awaken Greece and German blood supposedly renews Italy. His lecture gives racial hierarchy the appearance of historical explanation.

The boys’ reactions are mixed. Some dismiss the argument by pointing to civilizations and achievements it leaves out; others find something plausible in it. Whatever their response, Pompetzki’s arrival changes the school’s atmosphere almost overnight. Hans recalls that he had previously encountered no marked religious or racial hostility there. Now, before entering his classroom one morning, he hears an argument in which references to Jews recur with unmistakable intensity.

The Classroom Confrontation

When Hans opens the classroom door, the discussion stops. Six or seven boys stand together and look at him as though seeing him anew. Five return to their places, while Bollacher and Schulz continue to confront him. Bollacher, who has barely spoken to Hans for a month, grins at him; Schulz, a large and aggressive boy, makes his contempt apparent. Hans considers whether he could beat Schulz, but doubts that doing so would improve a situation already poisoned by the school’s changing mood. He goes to his desk instead, as Konradin von Hohenfels does, appearing absorbed in his homework and inattentive to what is happening.

Bollacher then rushes toward Hans and challenges his right to remain, pressing a small printed antisemitic notice onto Hans’s bench. Hans tells him to remove it. Bollacher refuses and threatens to break his bones if Hans tries. At this point, most of the boys, including Konradin von Hohenfels, get up to watch. Hans is frightened, but no longer hesitates: he strikes Bollacher in the face. The ensuing fight is unskilled and disorderly. Hans understands it as more than a personal quarrel: the political hostility of the wider world has made the two boys stand for opposing sides.

The struggle turns when Bollacher misses a blow, trips, and becomes wedged between two desks just as Pompetzki enters. Bollacher gets up and claims that Hans attacked him. Pompetzki asks Hans why he struck Bollacher and, after hearing that Bollacher had told him to leave for Palestine, dismisses the insult as friendly advice. He tells both boys to sit down, permits them to fight outside if they wish, and suggests that their problems will soon be solved. The lesson resumes. The response does not investigate the threat or the propaganda: it converts an attack on Hans’s belonging into something the teacher treats as legitimate.

Aftermath: Silence and Exclusion

That evening, Hans waits until the others have left, still hoping that Konradin von Hohenfels will be there to help or comfort him. The street is empty. The absence confirms a painful break in the friendship as Hans experiences it, though the scene does not establish what Konradin’s silence means to him. Hans begins avoiding him, reasoning that being seen together would embarrass Konradin and that his own withdrawal might be welcome. Their friendship, once a private refuge, can no longer shield Hans from the public hostility surrounding them.

Hans’s isolation spreads beyond the two boys. Few people speak to him; even Muscle Max, who has begun wearing a small silver swastika on his jacket, stops asking him to demonstrate his abilities. The older teachers also seem to have forgotten him. Hans is almost relieved by the resulting neglect, but recognizes it as the beginning of a longer uprooting: the people and assurances that had oriented his life are losing their force. The conflict therefore culminates less in the fight itself than in the social abandonment that follows it.

Departure and Larger Significance

At the beginning of December, Hans’s father takes him into his surgery and tells him that he and Hans’s mother have decided to send him to America, at least temporarily. His father imagines the political crisis as a storm that will pass and insists that the family will remain in Germany, which he regards as their homeland. This confidence echoes the family’s longstanding sense of belonging: Hans had understood his family as rooted in Stuttgart and considered being Jewish less significant than being Swabian and German. His father, a respected doctor and veteran of the First World War, had trusted that his service and the country’s cultural inheritance would protect him from Nazi antisemitism.

That faith cannot protect Hans at school. He leaves the Karl Alexander Gymnasium at Christmas and departs for America on January 19, his birthday. The confrontation thus belongs to the immediate chain of events that makes departure necessary: a racial theory enters the curriculum, classmates translate it into harassment, and the teacher declines to recognize the harassment as an insult. In retrospect, the episode also exposes the gap between the family’s confidence in German belonging and the exclusion being enforced around Hans. His father will later stand beside an antisemitic notice outside his surgery in his officer’s uniform and decorations; after that act of public defiance, he and Hans’s mother die by suicide. The schoolroom encounter is not the sole cause of that later fate, but it makes visible the process by which political exclusion penetrates ordinary life and leaves Hans increasingly separated from the home he believed would endure.