Hans’s Departure from Germany for America on His Seventeenth Birthday

Hans Schwarz’s departure from Germany for the United States on his seventeenth birthday is both a family decision made under growing antisemitic pressure and the start of a separation that lasts far longer than his parents expect. Sent to relatives in New York City for safety and future schooling, he leaves behind parents who believe they can remain in their home and that the crisis will pass. The narrator’s later account—thirty years in America—reveals the distance between that hope and the life the departure begins.

The decision to send him away

At the beginning of December, tired after coming home, Hans Schwarz is taken by Dr. Schwarz into his surgery for a private conversation. His father, who has aged during the preceding six months and seems to have difficulty breathing, tells him that he and Hans’s mother have decided to send him to the United States for the time being. Their relatives in New York City will look after him and arrange for him to attend university. The plan is presented as protection as well as preparation for a future that may be increasingly difficult to pursue in Germany.

The parents do not need Hans to describe what has been happening at school: they can imagine that it has not been easy, and they expect university there to be harder still. His isolation has already become tangible. He has avoided Konradin von Hohenfels, believing that being seen with him would embarrass Konradin, and few people speak to him. Even former sources of companionship have fallen away. Against that change, the decision to leave is not an abstract precaution but a response to a world in which the familiar supports of school and friendship are receding.

Dr. Schwarz insists that the separation will not be permanent. He expects people in Germany to come to their senses within a few years and says that he and Hans’s mother will stay. Germany is their fatherland and home, and they believe they belong there; Dr. Schwarz refuses to yield it to the political intruder he condemns. His certainty gives the decision its painful imbalance: the parents imagine a temporary departure for their son while remaining rooted in the place they call home.

Departure on his birthday

The plan is settled without a prolonged argument. Hans leaves school at Christmas, and on January 19, his birthday, he leaves for America. The date places the separation on a personal threshold: almost exactly a year earlier, Konradin von Hohenfels had entered his life. The timing does not make the departure a chosen coming-of-age journey. It marks how quickly a year of friendship and school life has given way to forced change.

Two days before leaving, Hans receives two letters. The first is a verse jointly written by Bollacher and Schulz, whose farewell directs a Jewish boy toward damnation. Its rhyme turns exclusion into a parting message: while Hans is preparing to go, classmates give him no sign of reconciliation, only a hostile confirmation of why he has become isolated. The contrast is stark. His parents arrange a destination and a future; the boys’ verse reduces his departure to an occasion for antisemitic contempt.

A temporary separation becomes exile

The family’s stated horizon is a few years, but the adult narrator looks back after thirty years in the United States. That difference changes the meaning of the parting without erasing the parents’ original hope. What they describe as a temporary refuge becomes the opening of a life elsewhere, while the claim that Germany remains home belongs to the family decision at the moment of departure, not to an outcome the parents can guarantee.

In the United States, Hans goes to school and then to Harvard University, where he studies law despite wanting to be a poet. His father’s cousin insists on a practical education first, and Hans becomes a lawyer at twenty-five. He later marries a woman from Boston and has one child; by his own account, he has done well professionally and is generally regarded as successful. These later details show the life built after departure, but they do not turn the original decision into a simple success story: the future takes shape through a course of study he dislikes and a separation his parents had expected to be brief.

The meaning of the departure

The departure joins intimate family care to a larger process of uprooting. Dr. Schwarz acts to protect his son by sending him away, yet he and Hans’s mother choose to remain, holding to their attachment to Germany and their expectation that the crisis will pass. Hans’s removal therefore divides the family’s response to danger: the young person is given a route toward safety and education abroad, while his parents refuse to abandon the home they claim as theirs.

The recollection also measures how much changes between the schoolboy’s last Christmas in Germany and the adult’s thirty-year life in America. Birthday, school departure, relatives, university, and profession give the transition concrete stages, but none cancels the initial rupture. What begins as a family’s provisional arrangement becomes a defining displacement: Hans can build a successful life in the United States, while the promised return to an earlier normality remains only the hope with which his parents sent him away.