Cover
About the Author
Also by Fred Uhlman
Dedication
Title Page
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Copyright
FRED UHLMAN was born in Stuttgart, capital of Württemberg in South-West Germany, on 19 January 1901, three days before Queen Victoria died. Reunion, written in 1960, is not therefore an autobiographical book, although it contains autobiographical elements. The school, the teachers and the boys are true to life, based on the Eberhard-Ludwig Gymnasium, Württemberg’s oldest and most famous grammar school, which the author attended. “The boy in the story is, of course, me,” he said, “but I never had any friendship with a ‘Hohenfels’. This part is purely fictional, and the Hohenfels are a composite picture of a few aristocratic boys and their parents.”
Fred Uhlman claims that it is Württemberg that made him into an artist and a poet, and left him a “Romantic” for life. This beautiful and traditionally democratic region, which includes the Black Forest and Lake Constance, is also the home of many of Germany’s greatest poets and thinkers – Schiller, Hölderlin, Mörike, Wieland, Uhland, Schlegel, Hegel, Schelling and Herman Hesse.
This love of his birthplace, which Uhlman, then an anti-Nazi lawyer, had to leave in 1933, illuminates every line of Reunion. He died in 1985.
I REMEMBER AS if it were yesterday my first encounter, some twenty years ago, with this small volume, brought to my attention by a friend. Delight and distress mingled in me so powerfully that I found myself smiling through tears that came to my eyes. My vision blurred and it was impossible to continue, a great happiness overcame me. It was as if, amid the flames of hell, angels had started to sing.
Only two or three times in the course of my life had I felt so stunned. With Isaac B. Singer perhaps, The Crown of Feathers; with good old Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and Aragon’s bizarre tale, Le Paysan de Paris, written during his youthful surrealist period before he turned to communism. At that time I was discussing books on television. I rushed onto the programme to announce, as forcefully as I could, that I had come upon a masterpiece written by a painter of German origin who lived in England.
The book had enormous success in France. First because of obvious qualities that nobody could miss, its literary perfection. Also, I think, because every reader was as anxious as I was to meet the author and to hug him to their heart.
The most admirable feature, I believe, in Fred Uhlman’s book is the conjunction of two adventures of unequal weight – an adolescent friendship and the rise of Nazism – where both of them are charged with the same emotion. The two themes are treated with a simple delicacy of touch that is quite enchanting, and to have set them forth so lucidly is an accomplishment that borders on the miraculous.
The book begins like Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, plunging us straightaway into the magical world of the very last days of childhood and the troubled beginnings of adolescence. A pupil arrives in a new class: “He came into my life in February 1932 and never left it again.” At once destiny, childhood love and teenage friendship set up a tingle in one’s spine.
Young Conrad von Hohenfels is as handsome and charming as a god; he befriends Hans Schwarz, the narrator, son of a Jewish doctor and grandson of a rabbi. Impossible, it seems to me, not to think at once of bonds forged elsewhere and in other circumstances, namely those that bind Charles Swann and the Guermantes in Proust. As with Swann and the Guermantes, young Schwarz is dazzled by the aura that surrounds the Hohenfels, and his friendship with Conrad takes a passionate turn, described by Uhlman with exquisite tact. The rabbi’s grandson keeps some priceless treasures in his room – a lion’s tooth, three Greek coins, an elephant’s molar, a Roman tile with the inscription LEG XI; he cannot wait to show them to his new friend, one of whose forbears had tried, albeit in vain, to save Frederick Barbarossa from drowning in the Cydnus and another of whom had died at Salerno in the arms of Frederick II Hohenstaufen, nicknamed Stupor mundi.
Here is the purest story of adolescence and friendship, between two boys whom History separates and ultimately destroys. Hitler is about to seize power, the most crass and barbaric savagery is about to ravage the land of Goethe and of Hölderlin. By the simplest words, which weigh more heavily than any amount of indignation or imprecation, we are set on the ineluctable path that leads to one of the most horrible catastrophes to afflict mankind. Conrad von Hohenfels’ mother sides with Hitler. Hans Schwarz’s parents commit suicide. Germany, her honour in shreds, is destroyed. Hans Schwartz survives the disaster by leaving for America.
The book’s ending, in a few lines, is a masterpiece within the masterpiece. It transforms, suddenly, what has been a long short story into a novel of epic dimensions; it adds a further luminous, dramatic quality, like the swell of an organ, to what has been a Bildungsroman, a story of growing-up, while retaining the powerful grace and simplicity of the short story. In the closing lines I gave up the fight; I wept buckets. No matter – it was the end.
Perhaps I may be allowed to insert a brief personal note. Throughout the era in which Fred Uhlman’s masterpiece is set, my father was a diplomat in Germany. He loathed Hitler. He saved many Jews like Hans Schwarz and his parents. He was also at ease in the milieu frequented by the Hohenfels which Uhlman depicts so well. I have the feeling that I grew up – I would have been six or seven – there in Uhlman’s novel and that its characters leaned over my little cot near the banks of the Isar in person. As I read Uhlman, as I followed, my heart in my mouth, the crossed destinies of Schwarz and the Hohenfels, I thought of my father. And my tears flowed the more freely.
And my joy, too. What is splendid, what is matchless in Fred Uhlman’s book is that it shows man’s baseness, stupidity and cruelty to be inseparable from his greatness and integrity. The book plunges us into sorrow and horror, and in the last line it restores to us our reasons for hope. This is what these few pages by a German Jewish painter, who lived in England, has in common with the great constructions of Dante, of Shakespeare, of Milton or of Pascal: the worst is not always to be counted on, and amid the accursed there are always the just and these, at the last moment, God snatches from the darkness.
HE CAME INTO my life in February 1932 and never left it again. More than a quarter of a century has passed since then, more than nine thousand days, desultory and tedious, hollow with the sense of effort or work without hope – days and years, many of them as dead as dry leaves on a dead tree.
I can remember the day and the hour when I first set eyes on this boy who was to be the source of my greatest happiness and of my greatest despair. It was two days after my sixteenth birthday at three o’clock in the afternoon on a grey, dark, German winter’s day. I was at the Karl Alexander Gymnasium in Stuttgart, Württemberg’s most famous grammar school, founded in 1521, the year when Luther stood before Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain.
I remember every detail: the classroom with its heavy benches and tables, the sour, musty odour of forty damp winter overcoats, the puddles of melted snow, the brownish-yellow lines on the grey walls where once, before the revolution, the pictures of Kaiser Wilhelm and the King of Württemberg had hung. If I shut my eyes I can still see the backs of my schoolmates, many of whom perished later on the Russian steppes or in the sands of Alamein. I can still hear the tired, disillusioned voice of Herr Zimmermann, who was condemned to teaching for life and had accepted his fate with sad resignation. He was a sallow-faced man, whose hair, moustache and sharply pointed beard were all tinged with grey. He looked out at the world through a pince-nez on the tip of his nose with the expression of a mongrel dog in search of food. Though he was probably not more than fifty years old to us he seemed to be eighty. We despised him because he was kind and gentle and because he had a poor man’s smell – his two-roomed flat probably had no bath – and he was dressed in a much patched, shiny, greenish suit which he wore during the autumn and the long, winter months (he had a second suit for spring and summer). We treated him with contempt and occasionally with cruelty, the cowardly cruelty which so many healthy boys show towards the weak, the old and the defenceless.
It was getting dark, but not dark enough for the lights to go on, and through the windows I could still clearly see the garrison church, an ugly late nineteenth-century building made beautiful now by the snow covering its twin towers which pierced the leaden sky. Beautiful too were the white hills that enclosed my home town, beyond which the world seemed to end and mystery to begin. I was half asleep and half awake, doodling, dreaming, occasionally pulling a hair out of my head to keep myself awake, when there was a knock at the door, and before Herr Zimmermann could say “Herein” in came Professor Klett, the Headmaster. But nobody looked at the dapper little man, for all eyes were turned towards the stranger who followed him as Phaedrus might have followed Socrates.