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| Author | Franz Werfel |
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| Original title | Der Abituriententag |
| Translator | Whittaker Chambers |
| Country | Austria |
| Language | German |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | P. Zsolnay |
Publication date | 1928 |
Published in English | 1929 |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
Class Reunion (original title: Der Abituriententag) is a novel by Franz Werfel first published in German in 1928.
The novel is about 43-year-old Dr. Ernst Sebastian, a lawyer who works as an Untersuchungsrichter (investigating judge) in the fictional town of Sankt Nikolaus during 1927. One Saturday afternoon a middle-aged man called Franz Adler, who has been arrested for the murder of a prostitute, is brought before him. During the interview—a preliminary hearing during which the two men are alone in Sebastian's office—Sebastian recognizes Adler as his old classmate, who attended the secondary school in Sankt Nikolaus, which was then in Austria-Hungary, for two years when they were both 16 and 17. Adler, however, who appears to him fearful and beaten by life, does not seem to recognize the judge, and Sebastian decides to postpone any private talk with Adler till the following Monday.
As it happens, that same Saturday night Sebastian attends a class reunion (the Abituriententag of the title) occasioned by the 25th anniversary of his Matura (Class of '02), a meeting he knows he will regret going to as it will bring back both a plethora of unpleasant memories and a confrontation with the bourgeois self-satisfaction of his former classmates.
That night, Sebastian does not go to sleep. Rather, upset by his chance meeting with Adler and the enervating talk at the class reunion, he sits down at his desk and writes down a confession in shorthand, which on the following morning turns out to be indecipherable to everyone including himself—except to the reader, who can read Sebastian's confession as the middle part of the novel.
At the age of 16, Sebastian, on the command of his father, the highest-ranking judge in Austria-Hungary, has to leave the prestigious Schottengymnasium in Vienna due to poor grades and is forced to continue his education in the provincial town of Sankt Nikolaus, where he stays with two aunts of his. A mediocre pupil, he tries desperately to attract the attention of his new classmates, who turn out to be very reluctant to accept the new boy into their close-knit community. In the course of one school year, however, Sebastian succeeds in tempting, and eventually seducing, many of his classmates to truancy, stay up late on a regular basis, lie to their teachers and parents, drink excessive amounts of alcohol, and eventually associate with prostitutes.
In particular, although he is aware of his mediocre performance at school and also of his own abominable character, Sebastian, rather than repent for his sins, sets out to conquer the intellectual superiority of his classmate Adler, a red-haired Jew who writes dramas and philosophical treatises, though he is only 17. To get rid of his rival once and for all, Sebastian pushes him into forging a document. The truth comes out, and before Adler can be expelled, Sebastian helps him escape to Germany, thus ensuring that his own part in the crime will never be revealed.
On the Monday following the class reunion, Adler is again brought before Sebastian. This time the judge does reveal his identity to Adler, but on closer inspection of the file in front of him he finds out that the man's assertion that he has never gone to school in Sankt Nikolaus is true.
In 1929, Whittaker Chambers translated Der Abituriententag from German, and it was published in English as Class Reunion. [1] [2]
During the trials of Alger Hiss in 1949, his defense team included in their attacks on Chambers' character the argument that Chambers was accusing Hiss out of a suggestion from Class Reunion.
In his memoir, Chambers wrote:
In Class Reunion, Dr. Carl Binger, the psychologist in the Hiss trials, undertook to discover the psychological clue to Chambers' "mysterious motives" in charging that Alger Hiss had once been a Communist. Chambers was the bad boy and Hiss was the good boy of Class Reunion, and the novel, unread by me for some twenty years, had put the idea of ruining Hiss in my mind – why I never quite understood, since it always seemed to me that if I had been bent on ruining Alger Hiss from base motives, the idea might well have occurred to me without benefit of Franz Werfel. But to many enlightened minds Class Reunion became a book of revelation.
I have always held that anyone who takes the trouble to read Class Reunion without having made up his mind in advance, can scarcely fail to see that, if there are any similarities at all between the characters, it is Hiss who superficially resembles the bad boy and Chambers who superficially resembles his victim. [3]
In 1974, a German language television movie with the same title was produced for the ZDF. It was directed by Eberhard Itzenplitz and starred Hans Jaray, Jan Christian, Bruno Dallansky, Peter Faerber, and Heinz Moog.
Alger Hiss was an American government official accused in 1948 of having spied for the Soviet Union in the 1930s. The statute of limitations had expired for espionage, but he was convicted of perjury in connection with this charge in 1950. Before the trial Hiss was involved in the establishment of the United Nations, both as a US State Department official and as a UN official. In later life, he worked as a lecturer and author.
Whittaker Chambers was an American writer and intelligence agent. After early years as a Communist Party member (1925) and Soviet spy (1932–1938), he defected from the Soviet underground (1938), worked for Time magazine (1939–1948), and then testified about the Ware Group in what became the Hiss case for perjury (1949–1950), often referred to as the trial of the century, all described in his 1952 memoir Witness. Afterwards, he worked as a senior editor at National Review (1957–1959). US President Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 1984.
Franz Viktor Werfel was an Austrian-Bohemian novelist, playwright, and poet whose career spanned World War I, the Interwar period, and World War II. He is primarily known as the author of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, a novel based on events that took place during the Armenian genocide of 1915, and The Song of Bernadette (1941), a novel about the life and visions of the French Catholic saint Bernadette Soubirous, which was made into a Hollywood film of the same name.
Hede Tune Massing, née "Hedwig Tune", was an Austrian actress in Vienna and Berlin, communist, and Soviet intelligence operative in Europe and the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. After World War II, she defected from the Soviet underground. She came to prominence by testifying in the second case of Alger Hiss in 1949; later, she published accounts about the underground.
Donald Hiss, also known as "Donie" and "Donnie", was the younger brother of Alger Hiss. Donald Hiss's name was mentioned during the 1948 hearings wherein his more famous and older brother, Alger, was accused of spying for the Soviet Union, and two years later convicted of perjury before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
Julian Wadleigh (1904–1994) was an American economist and a Department of State official in the 1930s and 1940s. He was a key witness in the Alger Hiss trials.
John Theodore Herrmann was a writer in the 1920s and 1930s and is alleged to have introduced Whittaker Chambers to Alger Hiss.
The Pumpkin Papers are a set of typewritten and handwritten documents, stolen from the US federal government by members of the Ware Group and other Soviet spy networks in Washington, DC, during 1937-1938, withheld by courier Whittaker Chambers from delivery to the Soviets as protection when he defected. They featured frequently in criminal proceedings against Alger Hiss from August 1948 to January 1950. The term quickly became shorthand for the complete set of handwritten, typewritten, and camera film documents in newspapers.
Perjury: The Hiss–Chambers Case is a 1978 book by Allen Weinstein on the Alger Hiss perjury case. The book, in which Weinstein argues that Alger Hiss was guilty, has been cited by many historians as the "most important" and the "most thorough and convincing" book on the Hiss–Chambers case. Weinstein drew upon 30,000 pages of FBI documents released through the Freedom of Information Act, the files of the Hiss defense attorneys, over 80 interviews with involved parties and six interviews with Hiss himself. In 1997, Weinstein published an updated and revised edition of Perjury, which incorporated recent evidence from Venona project decrypted cables, released documents from Soviet intelligence archives and information from former Soviet intelligence operatives.
Carl Binger (1889–1976), AKA Carl A. L. Binger, was a 20th-century American psychiatrist. He wrote books and articles on a wide range of topics, including medicine and psychiatry, and testified in the trial of Alger Hiss.
Bertrand Albert Andrews Jr. was a Washington-based reporter for the New York Herald Tribune who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for his article "A State Department Security Case."
Samuel Krieger (1902–1981) was an American union organizer, IWW member, Teamsters member, and communist.
Esther Shemitz, also known as "Esther Chambers" and "Mrs. Whittaker Chambers," was a pacifist American painter and illustrator who, as wife of ex-Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers, provided testimony that "helped substantiate" her husband's allegations during the Hiss Case.
Nathan Levine was an American labor lawyer and real estate attorney in Brooklyn, New York, who, as attorney for his uncle, Whittaker Chambers, testified regarding his uncle's "life preserver." This packet included papers handwritten by Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White, as well as typewritten by the Hiss Family's Woodstock typewriter. It also included microfilm, paraded to the public by U.S. Representative Richard M. Nixon and HUAC investigator Robert E. Stripling, dubbed the "Pumpkin Papers" by the press, which helped lead to the U.S. Department of Justice to indict Hiss for perjury.
William Luke Marbury Jr. was a prominent 20th-century American lawyer who practiced with his family's law firm of Marbury, Miller & Evans. He was known to be a childhood friend of alleged Soviet spy Alger Hiss.
Harold Rosenwald was an American lawyer, best known for working on the defense team of Alger Hiss during 1949 and in the prosecution of Louisiana governor Huey Long.
Priscilla Hiss, born Priscilla Fansler and first married as Priscilla Hobson, was a 20th-century American teacher and book editor, best known as the wife of Alger Hiss, an alleged Communist and former State Department official whose innocence she supported with testimony throughout his two, highly publicized criminal trials in 1949.
Friendship and Fratricide, an Analysis of Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss is a 1967 book by psychoanalyst Meyer A. Zeligs. In his work, Zeligs argued that Whittaker Chambers was a psychopathic personality who had framed Alger Hiss.
Witness, first published in May 1952, is a best-selling book of memoirs by American writer Whittaker Chambers (1901–1961), which recounts his life as a dedicated Marxist-communist ideologist in the 1920s, his work in the Soviet underground during the 1930s, and his 1948 testimony before the US Congress, which led to a criminal indictment against Alger Hiss and two trials in 1949.
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