Hohenfels residence (Palais Hohenfels)

The Hohenfels residence (Palais Hohenfels) is Konradin von Hohenfels’s family home and, for Hans Schwarz, the architectural form of a friendship that promises intimacy but remains bounded by class and family circumstance. Its iron gate, heraldic griffons, and silent entrance make the house seem at once alluring and forbidding. Hans eventually crosses its threshold, but the visit does not secure him a lasting place in Konradin’s world: the same gates become the image of their separation, and the house is later remembered as rubble.

The House as a Threshold

For a time, Hans and Konradin part company outside the Hohenfels residence. Konradin passes through the iron grille crowned by two griffons bearing the family shield, while Hans remains outside, watching the heavy gate and the path beyond it. The repeated scene gives the boundary a particular force: this is not simply a home Hans has not yet visited, but a space that seems to contain the private life to which his friendship has not admitted him. He waits for the door to open again and for Konradin to beckon him inside, but it does not.

The delay intensifies Hans’s attention to the house. He imagines its interior filled with historical and exotic treasures, including banners, armour, and objects from distant cities. Those imagined riches express his desire to know Konradin more fully, while the fixed barrier makes that desire feel increasingly uncertain. Hans cannot reconcile the exclusion with Konradin’s considerate conduct toward him. Too proud to ask for an invitation, he grows worried and suspicious, and the residence becomes an object of fascination precisely because it remains inaccessible.

Entering the Residence

One day, as Hans is leaving, Konradin turns back and invites him in to see his room. The invitation abruptly converts Hans’s long-held expectation into a real encounter. He is unprepared and anxious about his appearance and the prospect of meeting Konradin’s parents, but he follows Konradin through the gate and into the house.

The entrance hall is initially dark to Hans’s eyes. As he adjusts, he sees hunting trophies on the walls, among them enormous antlers, a European bison’s head, and an elephant’s tusks. A servant receives Konradin deferentially, and the boys climb a dark oak staircase. Hans glimpses oak-panelled walls and paintings of hunts, a portrait of a former king, and a castle. Higher up, images of Luther before Charles V, crusaders entering Jerusalem, and Barbarossa sleeping beneath the Kyffhäuser mountain give the interior a densely historical character. The house is not presented as a neutral backdrop: its objects and images surround Hans with signs of a family past and status unlike his own.

The tour also passes an open bedroom door, where Hans sees a dressing table, framed photographs chiefly of officers, and one image that briefly reminds him of Adolf Hitler. The resemblance shocks him, though he immediately decides he must be mistaken. The fleeting detail brings the political world into the aristocratic interior without resolving what the photograph is; Hans has neither time nor certainty to investigate it. The room remains, like much of the house, something he can glimpse without fully knowing.

Konradin’s own room is larger than Hans’s, but otherwise resembles it. Its view opens onto a maintained garden with a fountain, a small Doric temple, and a weathered statue. Konradin, however, is more eager to show his collection than to let Hans contemplate the view. He takes Greek coins from their cotton wool, including examples associated with Corinth, Knossos, Lampsacus, Agrigentum, Segesta, and Selinunte, then brings out further antiquities: a goddess from Gela in Sicily, a small orange-coloured bottle from Cyprus, and a Tanagra figure. The carefully kept collection makes the room a personal space within the imposing family home, where Konradin can share objects that he expects to provoke Hans’s wonder and envy.

Invitation, Exclusion, and Separation

The invitation allows Hans to enter the residence, but it does not erase the unequal conditions that have shaped his access to it. After a later confrontation between the friends, Hans takes Konradin’s hand without looking him in the eyes. The gesture preserves their affection even as the house’s boundary takes on a final meaning. Konradin slowly shuts the iron gates; Hans understands that he will not cross into this world again. When Konradin turns back and waves, Hans does not return the gesture, gripping the bars instead. The architecture that once held the promise of entry now gives visible form to a loss neither boy can undo.

Konradin does not invite Hans back. Their meetings continue as though the visit had not occurred, and Konradin still comes to see Hans’s mother, but these visits become less frequent. The residence’s exclusion is therefore not a simple end to all contact; rather, it marks the change within an outwardly continuing friendship. Both boys know that things cannot return to their former state and that their childhood friendship is beginning to end. The house matters because it makes that shift tangible: Hans has seen inside, but seeing is not the same as belonging.

The House in Retrospect

Much later, Hans asks what became of the Palais Hohenfels and is told that it is rubble. The answer sharply reverses the residence’s earlier image: the forbidding gate, heraldic griffons, historical pictures, and treasured collections belong to a place that no longer stands. Hans responds with laughter after also hearing that his former school is rubble. The brief exchange places the destroyed house within a wider landscape of remembered loss, without explaining its destruction in further detail.

The residence consequently holds two kinds of absence in Hans’s recollection. Before he enters, it is the unseen interior around which his longing and speculation gather; after the visit, it is the boundary that confirms the limits of his friendship with Konradin. In the later conversation, even that physical boundary has vanished. Its passage from mysterious stronghold to remembered rubble gives the house a compressed narrative arc: it once seemed to contain a world Hans could only imagine, then became the setting for a painful farewell, and finally survives in memory as something lost.