Hans Schwarz

Hans Schwarz is the retrospective narrator and central character of a story shaped by friendship, forced departure, and a belated discovery. As a Jewish teenager in Stuttgart, he forms an intense bond with Konradin von Hohenfels, whose aristocratic family background seems to place him in a different social world. Hans later leaves Germany for the United States under his parents’ protection, builds a successful professional life, and continues to measure the years since their friendship began against the emotional emptiness he describes. At the story’s close, a school record gives him the answer he has hesitated to seek: Konradin was executed for involvement in a plot to kill Hitler.

Identity and Background

Hans is the son of a Jewish doctor and the grandson and great-grandson of rabbis. He also describes his family as coming from generations of small merchants and cattle dealers. That heritage informs his sense of himself in the company of Konradin, whose name carries the weight of an illustrious Swabian family. Hans does not merely notice the difference between their backgrounds; he feels it as a barrier, wondering what he could offer a boy whose lineage and bearing seem to him almost impossibly elevated.

His recollection locates their first encounter in February 1932, at the Karl Alexander Gymnasium in Stuttgart. Hans was sixteen and remembers the hour and setting with unusual precision. The school, founded in 1521, belonged to a long civic history, while the classroom itself still bore traces of the political transformation that had removed portraits of the Kaiser and the King of Württemberg. Looking back, Hans also recalls schoolmates who later died on distant fronts in the Second World War. The remembered classroom is therefore both the small world in which the boys meet and the beginning of a past that will be overtaken by political upheaval and war.

The Beginning of the Friendship

At first Hans watches Konradin from a distance. He is struck by his classmate’s careful movements and formal composure, and compares his own ink-stained hands and lack of self-assurance with Konradin’s polished appearance. Hans assumes that his Jewish family background, modest social standing, and fear of being hurt make him an unlikely companion for the aristocratic boy. Yet Konradin’s effect on the class is not simply a private impression: other boys, usually boisterous with one another, become hesitant around him, and even their teacher seems reluctant to disturb him.

The first conversation does not immediately settle into a friendship. When the teacher interrupts them, Konradin leaves at the interval without looking back. Hans nevertheless treasures the exchange because it is their first time speaking, and he resolves that it will not be the last. His response shows how much meaning he has already invested in a connection that Konradin has not yet confirmed.

Three days later, on March 15, Hans sees Konradin on the way home from school. He slows down, anxious that overtaking him might look awkward, but cannot avoid passing him. Konradin turns, smiles, and shakes Hans’s trembling hand. Addressing him by name, he reveals through that small gesture that his reserve has concealed shyness and a need for friendship of his own. The boys walk together for an hour. Hans cannot later recall much of their conversation, but he remembers the meeting as a turning point: the prospect of companionship replaces the emptiness he had associated with his life. He runs home exhilarated, while his parents, accustomed to his silences and withdrawn moods, do not notice the change.

Exclusion and Departure from Germany

As political hostility narrows Hans’s place at school, the friendship becomes harder to sustain openly. Hans eventually avoids Konradin, believing that being seen with him would embarrass him and that Konradin would be grateful for the withdrawal. The decision leaves Hans increasingly isolated. A schoolmate who had once challenged him now wears a small silver swastika, and even teachers seem to have forgotten him. Hans describes this period as the beginning of a long uprooting: the people and habits that had once oriented him lose their force as his world contracts.

At the beginning of December, Hans’s father tells him that he and Hans’s mother have decided to send him to the United States. They have relatives in New York who can look after him and help arrange a university education. His father recognizes that school has become difficult for him and expects university in Germany to be worse. He presents separation as temporary, trusting that Germans will come to their senses within a few years. The parents themselves intend to stay. His father insists that Germany is their home and that he is too old to change his habits, while Hans, still young, has a future elsewhere.

The decision is made without further argument. Hans leaves school at Christmas and departs for the United States on January 19, his birthday, nearly a year after Konradin first entered his life. The timing makes the departure more than a change of country: it falls close to the anniversary of the friendship that had given his adolescence new hope. Two days before leaving, Hans receives two letters, one written in verse by Bollacher and Schulz. The available account identifies the letters but does not establish their contents or describe Hans’s response to them.

Life in the United States

Hans says that he has been in the United States for thirty years by the time of his later account. He attends school there and then studies law at Harvard University, although law is not what he wanted. His ambition was to become a poet. His father’s cousin refuses to accept that choice as a livelihood and directs him toward legal study first, leaving poetry for his spare time. Hans follows that advice, becomes a lawyer at twenty-five, and marries a woman from Boston. They have one child.

By outward measures, Hans considers his career successful: he says he has done well as a lawyer and that most people would agree he has made a success of things. That assessment stands beside, rather than cancels, his account of the years as tedious and hollow, filled with work that offered little hope. The contrast distinguishes professional arrival from emotional resolution. His life in America continues, but it does not undo the loss of the German home he believed his family belonged to, or the unresolved absence of the friend who had transformed his youth.

Memory and the Final Revelation

Hans’s narration is organized by the persistence of memory. More than a quarter-century after meeting Konradin, he can still recall the date and hour of their first encounter and the decisive handshake that followed. In the present of the telling, he describes more than nine thousand intervening days as deadened by effort and routine. The precision of the remembered beginnings contrasts with the long, indistinct years that follow: the friendship remains sharply present even when the life built after it has seemed empty.

At the end, Hans hesitates over a small book and wonders whether knowing Konradin’s fate will change anything. He considers destroying it, since he believes that whether Konradin is dead or alive they will never meet again, but cannot bring himself to tear it up. Instead, trembling, he opens it at the letter H. The entry identifies Konradin as implicated in the plot to kill Hitler and records that he was executed. The disclosure resolves the factual uncertainty Hans has carried across decades while confirming the finality of their separation. His reunion with Konradin can occur only through an entry in a book: the friendship that once made his life feel newly rich ends in a belated act of reading, with knowledge arriving too late to restore the person it names.