Exile and Displacement

Exile and displacement in the novel are not simply a journey from Germany to the United States: they begin as a measure meant to be temporary and become a lasting separation from home, family, language, and the past. Hans Schwarz leaves to escape the consequences of antisemitism, while his parents remain convinced that their place in Germany is secure. Their differing fates make displacement both a physical departure and a rupture in the beliefs that had made home feel permanent.

Home and the Belief in Belonging

Before Hans leaves, his family’s rootedness in Stuttgart seems almost beyond question. He understands the Schwarzes as having lived there for at least two hundred years and regards himself first as Swabian, then German, and then Jewish. Jewish identity is part of his family history, but it does not, in his childhood understanding, cancel his claim to Germany as his country and home. That sense of belonging gives later exile its force: he is not departing from a place he has always considered foreign, but from a life he believed would endure.

His father, Dr. Schwarz, embodies a similar confidence. A respected doctor, he has been publicly honored by eminent citizens, and his service in the First World War is marked by the Iron Cross, First Class. He regards Nazism as a temporary affliction and trusts that Germans will reject it. His conviction is not merely abstract patriotism: it rests on a life of professional esteem, civic recognition, and participation in Germany’s history. The signs that have assured him of belonging will not protect his family from the country’s changing political order.

Departure as a Family Decision

At the beginning of December, Dr. Schwarz summons Hans to his surgery and tells him that his parents have decided to send him to America until the political storm passes. Relatives in New York are to look after him and help him continue his education. His father recognizes that school has become difficult for him and expects that university would be worse. Yet he still imagines separation as brief: the family will remain in Germany, which he calls their Fatherland and home, and he expects the country to come to its senses within a few years.

The decision is presented as settled rather than open to debate. Hans’s father asks him not to argue, even as he acknowledges how painful the separation will be. The contrast between their positions is central to the novel’s account of displacement: Hans is young enough to be sent away and begin again, while his parents believe they are too established to change their lives. Their confidence makes the departure a protective act, but also reveals how little they can foresee what will follow.

Hans leaves school at Christmas and departs for the United States on January 19, his birthday, almost exactly a year after Konradin entered his life. Two days earlier, he receives two letters that frame the parting in sharply different ways. One, written in verse by Bollacher and another schoolmate, is an antisemitic farewell. The other, from Konradin, expresses sorrow at Hans’s departure while endorsing the political future that has made it necessary. The letters show that exile divides Hans not only from a country but from the social world he is leaving: open hostility and intimate attachment arrive together at the moment of departure.

A Friendship Divided by the New Germany

Konradin’s letter makes plain that affection does not overcome their political separation. He believes Adolf Hitler can restore Germany and accepts the exclusion of Jews from the future he imagines, while still telling Hans that Germany may have room for him again later. He also reassures Hans that his parents will not be molested and can live and die in peace. The assurance is tragically mistaken. The letter thus preserves the gulf between the friend who leaves and the friend who stays: Konradin remembers Hans as someone who taught him to think and doubt, but cannot see the danger to which his own belief exposes Hans’s family.

The separation is not described as a clean severing of affection. Konradin anticipates that their paths may cross again and says that Hans has influenced him. But his hope of a future reunion depends on a Germany that would accept Hans on terms set by the new regime. Exile therefore exposes the weakness of a promised return: the country to which Hans might come back is imagined as transformed, and the friend’s political faith already makes the old intimacy precarious.

Life in America and the Persistence of Exile

Hans later says that he has been in America for thirty years. He attends school, studies law at Harvard University, becomes a lawyer at twenty-five, and marries a woman from Boston; they have one child. These facts establish a life built after departure, not a return to the world he lost. Hans had wanted to be a poet, but his father’s cousin insists that he study law first. Professional success gives him security and the means to support causes he considers good, including racial equality and the abolition of capital punishment. He also contributes to efforts to help Jews build up Israel and Arabs settle refugees, and sends money to Germany.

Material and civic accomplishment do not dissolve his attachment to the country he left. Hans remains capable of speaking German, although he dislikes using it and presents speaking it as an effort when he meets Germans. He describes that behavior as a protective façade, adopted almost unconsciously. His distance is selective rather than a loss of language: he can still speak it, but reminders of Germany bring his unresolved wounds back into the present. The years in America therefore do not simply replace one home with another; they establish a life in which the old home remains emotionally active and difficult to approach.

Family Loss and the Meaning of Displacement

Hans’s parents do not end in a concentration camp, but their survival in Germany does not vindicate his father’s confidence. When a Nazi is stationed outside Dr. Schwarz’s surgery with an antisemitic notice, Dr. Schwarz stands beside him in his officer’s uniform and decorations, including the Iron Cross, First Class. A crowd gathers; hostility eventually turns against the Nazi, who leaves and is not replaced. The public episode briefly appears to confirm that the community may still defend Hans’s father. It does not restore the security he had trusted in.

A few days later, Dr. Schwarz takes his own life and his wife dies with him. Hans’s account connects their deaths to the political persecution and the collapse of his father’s faith in belonging, without making the temporary retreat of the Nazi a lasting protection. Afterward Hans avoids Germans as far as possible and stops opening German books, even Hölderlin. He says that he has tried to forget, but his guarded encounters and continuing aversion to the language show the limits of that effort. When a man from Württemberg tells him that three-quarters of Stuttgart was destroyed, the news reaches someone already separated from the city by departure, bereavement, and deliberate avoidance.

The novel’s treatment of exile holds two losses together: Hans is removed from the home he had believed to be his, and the parents who stayed do not survive the political world they expected to outlast. His American life is real and substantial, yet it cannot undo that double separation. Displacement persists in the protective habits through which he manages memory—in the German he refuses to use, the books he will not open, and the distance he keeps from people whose nationality has become inseparable from danger.