Antisemitism

Antisemitism in the narrative is not a single prejudice but a widening pressure: it appears in aristocratic family hostility, enters the classroom as a public accusation, and becomes official policy that puts Hans Schwarz’s family at risk. Its force lies in the collision between that exclusion and the Schwarzes’ conviction that Stuttgart and Germany are their home. What begins as an attitude held by others ends by shaping Hans’s departure and his parents’ fate.

Belonging and Assimilation

Hans grows up understanding Jewish identity as one part of a settled German life. His family has lived in Stuttgart for at least two hundred years, and he regards being Swabian and German as more fundamental to everyday belonging than being Jewish. His parents do not reject their Jewish origins, but religious practice has little place in their lives: his mother attends synagogue once a year, while his father observes the occasion chiefly out of consideration for others. In this household, assimilation is not a strategy for temporary safety; it is bound up with the belief that Germany is home.

That confidence is especially pronounced in his father, Dr. Schwarz. When a Zionist warns him that Adolf Hitler’s rise should unsettle his faith in Germany, Dr. Schwarz dismisses Nazism as a passing illness and invokes the German cultural tradition and the memory of twelve thousand Jewish soldiers who died for their country. He openly calls himself an assimilant, arguing that Jews can enrich German culture even without complete absorption. His certainty rests on public recognition as well as conviction: he is a popular doctor, respected by Jews and Gentiles, and his Iron Cross, First Class, hangs above his bed. These signs of service and standing make the later official exclusion of Jews a direct repudiation of the belonging he believes he has earned.

Prejudice within the Friendship

The limits of that belonging become personal through Konradin von Hohenfels. After Konradin avoids acknowledging Hans in front of his parents, he explains that his mother, from a once-royal Polish family, hates Jews and regards them as beneath the social order. She fears Hans’s influence over her son, imagines him connected to a Jewish conspiracy, and treats their friendship as damage to the Hohenfels family’s standing. The hostility is therefore not based on a personal encounter with Hans: Konradin says his mother fears Jews despite never having met one.

Konradin insists that he is not ashamed of Hans and says that Hans is his only friend, but he has had to fight for every hour they spend together. His mother’s prejudice shapes the friendship even when she is absent, making ordinary recognition a source of conflict. Her suspicions also recast religious and political difference as contamination: she believes Hans has weakened Konradin’s faith and aligned him with Bolshevism. The episode shows how antisemitism can operate through family authority and inherited rank, restricting a relationship without requiring a direct confrontation between the person who holds the prejudice and the person targeted.

From School Hostility to Public Exclusion

At school, antisemitism changes from a background assumption into a collective and visible force. After a change in the atmosphere, Hans hears boys repeating references to Jews behind the classroom door. When he enters, several stop speaking; Bollacher and Schulz remain conspicuously hostile. Bollacher challenges Hans to return to Palestine and sticks an antisemitic printed notice on his bench. Hans tells him to remove it, and Bollacher threatens him when he refuses. The exchange turns an abstract political message into an attempt to make Hans answer for a supposed foreignness in the place he considers home.

The response of the adults deepens the injury. When asked why he fought Bollacher, Hans explains that the other boy told him to go back to Palestine. Pompetzki treats the demand not as an insult but as friendly advice, then redirects the class to its history lesson. The classroom’s authority thus fails to name the exclusion taking place; it gives the aggressor’s claim a measure of legitimacy. Hans waits after school hoping Konradin will support or comfort him, but leaves to an empty street. From then on he avoids his friend, and his isolation grows as other students and teachers cease engaging with him. Antisemitism separates him not only from the school community but also from a friendship he had trusted.

Political Doctrine and Its Consequences

Konradin’s farewell letter reveals how political exclusion is being rationalized beyond the school. He tells Hans that he believes Adolf Hitler can restore Germany and describes the choice between Stalin and Hitler as one he resolves in Hitler’s favor. Although he regrets that Hans has no place in the Germany he imagines for the near future, he expects Jewish people judged acceptable by the leader to be distinguished from those deemed undesirable. His appeal to a future return does not undo the exclusion: it makes Hans’s place conditional on a political authority deciding which Jews may belong.

Hans’s father initially refuses to accept that his own standing can be erased. When a Nazi is posted outside his surgery with a notice warning Germans to avoid Jews, Dr. Schwarz puts on his officer’s uniform and decorations and stands beside him. A crowd gathers; its hostility is directed at the Nazi, who eventually leaves and is not replaced. The gesture briefly reverses the intended public shame: the Jewish doctor’s uniform and service challenge the notice’s claim that he is outside the German community. But the reprieve does not last. A few days later, while Hans’s mother is asleep, Dr. Schwarz turns on the gas, and both parents die. Hans’s departure for the United States had already been arranged because his parents believed it was safer for him to leave; their own insistence on remaining in their Fatherland could not protect them.

Narrative Significance

The progression from private prejudice to official exclusion undercuts the assumption that cultural participation, military service, professional respect, or longstanding residence can guarantee acceptance. Hans’s father’s decorations and public reputation matter because they make the contradiction concrete: the same society that recognized his service permits an anti-Jewish notice to be placed outside his surgery. Konradin’s mother, the schoolboys, and the Nazi represent different settings and degrees of power, but together they show prejudice narrowing the space in which Hans can live as both Jewish and German.

The narrative also preserves the unevenness of response. Konradin values his friendship with Hans but accepts Adolf Hitler’s political promise; Dr. Schwarz resists a public act of exclusion but remains committed to a Germany that has made his son’s departure necessary. Hans’s later caution toward Germans reflects the consequences of these betrayals: he checks the histories of those who opposed Hitler before trusting them. Antisemitism thus becomes not only a threat that drives separation, but a force that damages the meanings of home, friendship, and trust long after Hans has left Germany.