Originally published in 1971, Fred Uhlman’s novella Reunion received much praise when it was republished in English in 2016. The author was born in Stuttgart in 1901 and fled first to France, then Catalonia and then Britain in the 1930s to escape the Nazis. This timely production invites us to reflect on today’s fascisms in the light of that which gripped Nazi Germany. But so faithful an adaptation, it highlights more the stark differences than the similarities. 

Reunion is a sensitive, unsentimental and remarkably succinct study of the dissemination of Nazism among the adolescent boys of an elite school in the early 1930s. The story centres on a boyhood friendship between Hans, the son of a Jewish doctor, and Konradin, who belongs to a prestigious Protestant family. 

This is the type of friendship that today may seem obsolete and naive with the advent of social media. Konradin’s mother has an intense aversion to Jews and a predilection for photos of the Führer in her home; today, it is women (who play little role in Uhlman’s book), as well as other vulnerable minority groups that bear the brunt of troll attacks and online propaganda from clandestine sources. Significantly, too, there is no possible place of exile these days in the era of the all-seeing eye of Big Tech and the globally connected alt-right; certainly not in the United States where Hans in the book ends up. 

We no longer live in an age of innocence and ignorance. We are all informed and all complicit in tolerating and even sharing aspects of an empty and brutal right-wing ideology, be it with a mere click on a link or a failure to vote. This production of Fred Uhlman’s work is a wonderful and welcome reminder of the triumph as well as the failings of human nature, and in this sense the story is timeless. But its relevance to today’s world needed better stating.