Hans Schwarz’s exile in America

Hans Schwarz’s exile in America is both a physical departure from Germany and a prolonged estrangement from the home he had regarded as his own. Sent away as a teenager for his safety, he builds an adult life in the United States, yet his parents’ deaths and the hostility he associates with Germany leave the separation unresolved. Decades later, an appeal from his former school makes the past present again, showing that distance has not erased his connection to it.

Decision and Departure

At the beginning of December, Hans’s father called him into his surgery to explain that he and Hans’s mother had decided to send him to America. The decision followed a period in which Hans had become increasingly isolated at school. His father acknowledged that the situation there could not have been easy and feared that a university would be worse. He described the move as temporary, until the political storm passed, and believed that people in Germany would come to their senses within a few years.

Hans’s parents did not plan to leave with him. His father insisted that Germany remained their home and that they would stay, while presenting the departure as an opportunity for his young son to preserve his future. Relatives in New York City would look after Hans and arrange for him to attend university. His father also urged him not to argue, emphasizing how difficult the separation would be for the family. The decision therefore offered practical protection, but placed the burden of leaving on Hans alone.

The plan was carried out quickly. Hans left school at Christmas and departed for America on January 19, his birthday, almost exactly a year after Konradin von Hohenfels had entered his life. The birthday makes the departure a threshold between childhood in Germany and an uncertain future abroad. Two days beforehand, Hans received a farewell verse jointly written by Bollacher and Schulz. Its hostile, antisemitic mockery turned his departure into a public rejection, in sharp contrast with his father’s private insistence that the separation would not last.

Building a Life in the United States

The promised temporary stay extended into decades. At the time of the narration, Hans has been in America for thirty years. He attended school after arriving and then studied law at Harvard University, although his own ambition was to become a poet. His father’s cousin would not accept that plan as a profession and insisted that Hans study law first, leaving poetry for his spare time. Hans complied, became a lawyer at twenty-five, and eventually married a woman from Boston; they had one child.

By conventional measures, this life is a success. Hans says that his legal career has gone reasonably well, and that most people would consider him successful. But the account places that achievement beside the future he had wanted rather than presenting it as a simple fulfillment. The legal career arose from a relative’s practical direction, while poetry remained Hans’s own unrealized preference. His settled adult circumstances thus coexist with the displacement that initiated them: the life he made in America is real, but it began through a decision taken amid danger and separation.

Germany as an Unhealed Separation

Hans’s parents remained in Germany, but they did not survive the years of Nazi persecution. His father publicly stood beside a Nazi displaying an antisemitic notice outside the surgery, wearing his officer’s uniform and decorations, including the Iron Cross, First Class. A crowd gathered; its hostility turned toward the Nazi, who eventually left and was not replaced. A few days later, while Hans’s mother was asleep, his father opened the gas, and both parents died. Their deaths make the promised short separation irreversible, and Hans is relieved that they did not end in a concentration camp.

Afterward, Hans tried to avoid Germans and stopped opening German books, including works by Hölderlin. His account presents this avoidance as an effort to forget, not as evidence that the past had ceased to matter. He sometimes met Germans who had been imprisoned for resisting Hitler, but first made sure of their histories before accepting them. Even these men, despite their resistance, seemed to carry guilt, and Hans felt sympathy for them. Sympathy did not remove his caution or make the encounters easy.

German remained a language Hans could speak perfectly well, though with an American accent. He disliked using it and pretended that speaking it was difficult when talking with a German. The pretense functioned as a protective façade, one he says he adopted almost unconsciously. His exile therefore persists in ordinary acts of conversation: the language survived intact, but speaking it could recall the injuries associated with the country he had left. The distance is not simply geographical; it is also a deliberate barrier against reminders of loss.

The Past Returns Through the School

Years later, an appeal arrived from the Karl Alexander Gymnasium, accompanied by a small book of names and a request for a contribution to a memorial for boys killed in the Second World War. Hans could not understand how the school had found his address or remembered him as one of its former pupils. His first response was to reject the appeal. He had, in his own reckoning, cut seventeen years out of his life and wanted nothing to do with the school’s dead or with the community that had once been his.

He changed his mind and read the appeal. Four hundred former pupils had been killed or were missing. The accompanying names were arranged alphabetically, and Hans went through the list while avoiding the letter H. He recognized the names of two boys from his class, although he could no longer remember one of them clearly. This encounter makes the memorial more than a request for money: it brings back the social world from which exile separated him, while exposing how memory has both preserved and thinned that world. Hans had tried to disown those years, yet the appeal and the names draw him back into relation with them.

Significance of the Exile

Hans’s departure begins as an attempt to protect a young person from a worsening political climate, but its consequences exceed the original plan. His parents’ confidence that the family would soon be reunited proves tragically mistaken; Hans grows up across the ocean, builds a profession and family, and remains guarded toward the language and people of his country of origin. The later school appeal tests his claim to have severed the past. His refusal to identify with the dead is followed by the act of reading their names, a small but consequential return of attention.

The exile is therefore neither a clean escape nor a completed assimilation. Hans establishes a life in America, but the means of that stability include self-protection, avoidance, and the suppression of an earlier identity. The narrative’s return to the school memorial demonstrates the limit of forgetting: even after decades abroad, a list of names can reopen the connection he believed he had cut. His life is at once a record of adaptation and of a separation that never becomes fully past.