Hans’s Fight with Bollacher

Hans’s Fight with Bollacher is the moment when the anti-Jewish hostility gathering around Hans Schwarz becomes a direct physical and institutional confrontation. Hans strikes Bollacher after Bollacher places an antisemitic notice on his desk and threatens him; when Herr Pompetzki arrives, the teacher recasts Bollacher’s demand that Hans leave for Palestine as friendly advice. The fight marks not a victory that restores Hans’s place among his classmates, but the beginning of a sharper isolation.

Background: A changing school and a false sense of distance

For a time, political conflict had seemed remote from Hans and Konradin von Hohenfels’s friendship. In Stuttgart, life largely continued as usual, despite swastikas appearing on walls, an assault on a Jewish citizen, and violence against Communists. Hans and Konradin treated politics as an adult concern, while their own urgent questions were how to live well and what purpose life might have. That confidence in the durability of ordinary life makes the later confrontation a rupture: the public hostility they had regarded as peripheral enters their classroom and addresses Hans directly.

The wider school atmosphere had already begun to change. The history curriculum had not reached events later than 1870, leaving students with little formal preparation for the political crises unfolding around them. Outside the school, large posters blamed Jews and the Treaty of Versailles, while unemployed people marched through the streets. Inside, tradition could still make time seem suspended, but the distinction between the classroom and public politics was becoming harder to maintain.

Herr Pompetzki’s arrival sharpened that change. A Prussian teacher whose clipped diction sounded unfamiliar to pupils accustomed to Swabian speech, he divided history into what was already in the books and the history still to come. He spoke of unnamed dark powers undermining national life; the students understood that he meant Jews, though he avoided naming them. His lesson produced disagreement among the boys, but even opposition to his claims did not prevent the atmosphere from shifting. The fight occurs after that ideological language has entered the classroom, not in a school untouched by it.

The confrontation

One morning, Hans heard a heated discussion behind the closed classroom door. The only words he could make out were repeated references to Jews, spoken with unmistakable intensity. When he entered, the discussion stopped. Six or seven boys had gathered; most moved back to their seats, while Bollacher and Schulz continued to stare at him. Bollacher wore a mocking, superior expression, and Schulz held his nose as if Hans smelled bad. The gestures turned the argument’s abstract hostility into a public act of exclusion.

Hans considered confronting Schulz, whom he regarded as a much larger opponent, but hesitated. He doubted that winning a fight would improve the poisoned atmosphere. Instead, he went to his place and pretended to look over his homework. Konradin was also at his desk, presenting himself as too occupied to notice what was happening. That apparent withdrawal matters to Hans: the confrontation unfolds before classmates, including his closest friend, yet Hans does not receive visible support from him.

Bollacher advanced after interpreting Hans’s restraint as an opening. He asked why Hans did not return to Palestine, then licked a small printed notice and stuck it on Hans’s bench. Its message blamed Jews for Germany’s troubles and called on people to awaken. Hans told him to remove it. Bollacher refused and threatened to break every bone in Hans’s body if Hans did it himself. The exchange leaves Hans with a choice between accepting a public insult and acting under threat; when most of the boys, including Konradin, stood up to watch, he no longer hesitated.

Hans hit Bollacher in the face as hard as he could. Bollacher staggered, came back at him, and the two fought without technique. Hans understood the struggle as more than a personal quarrel: in his account, it was also a fight between a Nazi and a Jew, and he believed he was on the just side. That conviction gives the moment its moral stakes, while the roughness of the encounter keeps those stakes grounded in a schoolroom dispute rather than turning Hans’s response into a solution to the prejudice around him.

Pompetzki’s intervention

The fight changed course when Bollacher swung at Hans and missed. He tripped and became wedged between two desks just as Pompetzki entered. Bollacher got up, visibly mortified and in tears, and accused Hans of attacking him. Asked why he had gone for Bollacher, Hans answered that Bollacher had insulted him. Pompetzki then asked what Bollacher had said. Hans explained that he had been told to return to Palestine.

Pompetzki’s response exposed the authority behind the classroom’s new hostility. He smiled and said that this was not an insult but sound, friendly advice. He ordered both boys to sit down, added that they could fight outside if they wished, and told Bollacher to be patient because their problems would soon be solved. Rather than recognize the demand that Hans leave as an act of exclusion, the teacher normalized it and implied that the future would resolve the matter in Bollacher’s favor. His intervention thus did not simply stop a fight: it transformed an antisemitic provocation into something the school’s authority could treat as acceptable.

Isolation and consequence

That evening, Hans waited until everyone else had gone. He still hoped Konradin would be there to help or console him when he needed him most. Instead, he left to find the street empty. The absence becomes a second blow after the teacher’s dismissal: in the moment when Hans hoped his friendship would offer support, there was no one waiting for him. From then on, Hans avoided Konradin, assuming that being seen with him would embarrass him and that Konradin would be grateful for the separation.

Hans’s social world contracted. Hardly anyone spoke to him; even Muscle Max, who had worn a small silver swastika on his jacket and once asked Hans to demonstrate his abilities, stopped approaching him. The older teachers also seemed to have forgotten him. Hans was, he says, rather glad of the neglect, but recognizes it as part of a long, cruel process of uprooting. The fight therefore has consequences beyond the exchange of blows: it makes visible the loss of ordinary companionship and institutional attention that follows when prejudice is permitted to govern daily relations.

The surrounding events place this rupture within a larger departure without making the fight its sole cause. At the beginning of December, Hans’s father told him that his parents had decided to send him to America, acknowledging that school had not been easy for him and believing that a university would be still harder. Hans left school at Christmas and departed on January 19, his birthday. The confrontation helps explain the school pressure he faced, while his father’s account also presents the decision as a response to the wider political danger.

Narrative significance

The scene reverses Hans’s earlier assumption that Jewish identity was only a small part of a secure German and Swabian belonging. His family had regarded Stuttgart as home for generations, and his father had trusted that his service to Germany, including his First World War wounds and Iron Cross, would count for something. At school, however, Hans is told to go to Palestine, and Pompetzki validates the demand. The fight brings the contradiction between inherited belonging and imposed exclusion into immediate view.

Retold by Hans from a later vantage point, the event also establishes the pattern of his separation: the prejudice is first announced through slogans and gestures, then enforced through a teacher’s response, and finally experienced as loneliness and departure. Bollacher’s provocation gives Hans a moment to act, but it cannot repair the classroom or restore his friendship. Its decisive consequence is the recognition that the place Hans had considered home can turn against him through ordinary school interactions, with the people around him either joining in or failing to intervene.