Konradin von Hohenfels

Konradin von Hohenfels is the German aristocrat whose friendship becomes central to Hans Schwarz’s youth and whose later choices complicate Hans’s memory of their bond. Introduced as a boy of Hans’s own age, he first appears composed and unusually mature; in time, he proves shy and eager for friendship. His aristocratic background shapes how others receive him, but it does not explain away the sharper conflict that emerges between his attachment to Hans and his mother’s antisemitism, and later between their friendship and his support for Adolf Hitler.

Identity and Introduction

When the new pupil is asked for his details, he gives his name as Graf von Hohenfels, Konradin, and says he was born on January 19, 1916, at Burg Hohenfels in Württemberg. The formality of his introduction and his title mark him as a count, but Hans’s first impression is not simply that he belongs to a different social class. Hans has already encountered titled boys who seemed no different from their classmates, including one whose family could afford only margarine. What distinguishes Konradin is the composure with which he enters the classroom, giving him an air of maturity that makes him seem almost like a visitor from another world.

That first impression gives way to a more vulnerable person. On March 15, as Hans is walking home from school, Konradin turns toward him, smiles, and shakes his hand with visible hesitation. He greets Hans by name. The simple gesture is decisive: Hans recognizes that Konradin, too, is shy and in need of a friend. They walk together for an hour, still awkward with one another, but Hans understands the meeting as the beginning of a relationship that will change his formerly lonely life.

Friendship with Hans Schwarz

The friendship is confirmed the next day, when Konradin comes directly to Hans and sits beside him. His pleasure at seeing Hans seems so genuine that Hans’s fear that he might have misread the previous afternoon falls away. From then on, they are inseparable. They leave school together because their homes lie in the same direction, and Konradin waits for Hans in the mornings. Their closeness becomes ordinary to most of their classmates, although Bollacher gives them the mocking nickname Castor and Pollack, and another classmate responds by cutting them off.

For Hans, the friendship is more than companionship. After their first walk, he runs home in a state of elation, feeling that his life has changed and that he is no longer emotionally impoverished. His parents, preoccupied and accustomed to his adolescent silences, do not notice the change. Later that night, the happiness is shadowed by anxiety: Hans worries that Konradin may regret befriending him, or that his parents may object because Hans is Jewish. The following morning’s welcome answers those fears, but the episode shows how readily antisemitism has already shaped Hans’s expectations of friendship.

Family Prejudice and Concealment

That fear proves to have a real basis. When Hans challenges Konradin about avoiding him in the presence of his parents and never introducing him to them, Konradin insists that he is neither ashamed of Hans nor unwilling to be his friend. He says Hans is his only trusted friend and that losing him would mean losing the only person he can rely on. The explanation for his conduct, he admits, is his mother’s hostility toward Jews.

Konradin describes his mother as belonging to a distinguished, once royal Polish family whose inherited social outlook places Jews beneath even serfs. Although she has never met a Jewish person, she fears and detests Jews. She regards Konradin’s friendship with Hans as a stain on the Hohenfels family name, is jealous that her son has chosen a Jewish friend, and believes Hans has weakened his religious faith. She also casts the friendship as part of a supposed Jewish and Bolshevik conspiracy. Konradin says he has argued with her and had to fight for each hour he spends with Hans. His failure to speak to Hans on the previous evening, he explains, came from not wanting to hurt him, not from shame. The intimacy between the boys is therefore real, but it exists under pressure from a household in which prejudice determines who may be acknowledged.

Political Convictions and the Farewell Letter

In a later letter to Hans, who is leaving Germany for the United States, Konradin expresses sorrow at the separation and recognizes that Hans loves Germany. He nevertheless considers departure the wisest course because he expects the country’s future to be shaped by Adolf Hitler. Konradin says he believes Hitler can rescue Germany from materialism and Bolshevism, and recounts meeting him in Munich while accompanying his mother. Though he initially found Hitler unimpressive in appearance, he says the man’s conviction, will, intensity, and apparent insight persuaded him. His mother, Konradin reports, was moved to tears after the encounter.

The letter makes Konradin’s political position explicit: he prefers Hitler to Stalin and believes Hitler can distinguish between Jewish people he considers acceptable and those he considers undesirable. He imagines that Hans may return after a temporary period of exclusion, and assures him that his parents can remain in Germany in peace and security. These assurances sit uneasily beside the danger the letter itself recognizes: Konradin accepts that there will be no place for Hans in the Germany of the near future, yet treats that exclusion as limited and believes the new leadership will decide which Jews merit acceptance. His affection for Hans survives, but it does not lead him to reject the ideology threatening Hans’s place in the country.

Even so, the letter does not reduce their history to political disagreement. Konradin tells Hans that he will always remember him and credits him with teaching him to think and doubt, and, through doubt, to find Jesus Christ. The statement preserves a trace of the friendship’s intellectual and personal influence while revealing its limits: Konradin can acknowledge what Hans gave him without abandoning his confidence in Hitler or his acceptance of antisemitic exclusion.

Death and Retrospective Significance

Years later, Hans hesitates over whether to read a little book that might tell him what became of Konradin. He nearly tears it up, questioning whether the answer could matter when he will never see his former friend again, but at the last moment opens it to the letter H. There he finds the entry stating that Konradin was implicated in the plot to kill Adolf Hitler and was executed.

The brief record settles Konradin’s fate but does not reconcile the opposing parts of his life. The boy who once waited for Hans and described him as his only friend later supported a political order that denied Jews a secure place in Germany; the man named in the book was ultimately executed for involvement in a plot against its leader. Because Hans encounters the news only at the end, Konradin’s death arrives not as a scene between the two friends but as a stark archival fact. It closes the possibility of reunion while leaving their friendship, and the contradiction between Konradin’s personal loyalty and political judgment, unresolved.