L'amico ritrovato

by Fred Uhlman

Other authorsArthur Koestler (Introduction)

Paper Book, 1988

Status

Available

Call number

823.914

Genres

General Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Collection

Your library

Publication

Milano, Club degli Editori

Description

Reunion is a little-known novel. But it is also a universal story of friendship. It is a book of great power, waiting to be discovered. On a grey afternoon in 1932, a Stuttgart classroom is stirred by the arrival of a newcomer. Middle-class Hans is intrigued by the aristocratic new boy, Konradin, and before long they become best friends. It's a friendship of the greatest kind, of shared interests and long conversations, of hikes in the German hills and growing up together. But the boys live in a changing Germany. Powerful, delicate and daring, Reunion is a story of the fragility, and strength, of the bonds between friends. WITH AN AFTERWORD BY RACHEL SEIFFERT

User reviews

LibraryThing member John

This is a small book--a novella as Arthur Koestler calls it in the introduction--that I bought and read twenty years ago in Brussels. I enjoyed it then, and for some reason I picked it up again this afternoon and read, and enjoyed it, again. It is the story, told in the first person, of the

unlikely friendship between Hans Schwartz, Jewish, and Konradin von Hohenfels, scion of an illustrious family that sits atop the pinnacle of society in Stuttgart. As two equally shy, reticent young boys (16 years), they become friends when they find themselves together in the same class. It is a strong and deep friendship built on the mutual exploration of life and god and the cosmos and all those other questions that pre-occupy inquisitive teenagers. But it is a friendship that cannot survive the growing pressures of society. Hans' parents can see the shape of things to come, and send Hans to America to go to university, after which he becomes a successful lawyer. So the story is told in a retrospect of 40 years. Konradin writes to Hans on the eve of his departure to say that given the uncertainties of the times, he thinks it best that Hans is leaving, although it will only be for a few years until things settle down, because Hitler, whom Konradin has met and admires, will know the difference between the good Jews and the negative elements. In the end, Hans is reminded of this part of his life, although he has never really forgotten it, when he receives a standard request, as an alumnus, from the school for a contribution. He looks at the long lists of names, some of whom he remembers, and notes how many are missing, or died particularly in Russia. He waits and resists looking under "H" until the very last line of the book which closes the circle, and brings closure for Hans: "von Hohenfels, Konradin, implicated in the plot to kill Hitler. Executed."

The story is successful and feels right because Uhlman is able to bring so many elements to bear and into focus in such a short story. Hans lives in relatively quiet backwater town where he has never suffered any discrimination and where his father is a respected doctor who earned the Iron Cross First Class in WWI as an officer; his worries are those of any other sixteen-year old boy growing up. But this life is invaded by the outside forces (a new history teacher who extols the primary role of Aryan influence throughout world history, and who is first ridiculed by the boys, but who begins to win them over), the boys who may never have been friends, but who become Jew-baiters and start to torment Hans, the aristocratic welcoming of Hitler because of a deep in-grained anti-semitism (Konradin's mother) and the essentially benign, unseeing, and uninvolved aristocrat (Konradin's father), the townspeople who first side with Hans' father when a Nazi tries to close down his surgery, but whom one knows would have tempered their feelings later out of personal concerns if nothing else, and Konradin, the initial supporter and enthusiast for Hitler and what he was doing for Germany, particularly in contrast with the feared and hated Stalin, but who in the end had the courage and the moral vision to see the evil and to try to act against it. A lot of thoughts, ideas, currents in such a short work, but well-written and done in a subtle, almost oblique manner. Well worth reading.

Show Less

3 more

LibraryThing member jwhenderson

Arthur Koestler described this novella as a "minor masterpiece". I would agree as it is a perceptive short novel about friendship. However, set in the 1930s in Stuttgart, it is also a tragedy and a story about love. It tells of two boys attending high school, one is a Jewish intellectual from the

middle class while the other is a young aristocratic gentile. The story is as moving as the friendship is unremarkable, yet it lingers in one's memory. It is a literary miniature that is as moving as books more than twice its size. . .

Show Less

LibraryThing member krago

Ranks with the best novellas of all time.

LibraryThing member starbox

Beautiful and powerful novella, in which Jewish narrator, Hans Schwarz, recalls his adolescence in pre-WW2 Stuttgart. He takes us back to an unexceptional day at school when a new student is enrolled - the aristocratic Konradin von Hohenfels.
Schwarz re-lives his almost obsessive interest in this

godlike youth, the way their friendship takes off. But as Nazism takes over, von Hohenfels has to keep his new friend well away from the family home. Indeed, it seems that the boy, too, has a level of sympathy for Hitler...
The end comes as a surprise. Very well written.

Show Less

Fewer