Vintage Past: Inventive tales of times gone by to tell the histories we think we know
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. Its 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.
About the Author
Fred Uhlman, born in Stuttgart in 1901, claimed that his South-West German homeland of Württemberg, made him a "romantic" for life and formed the essence of his sensibilities as a poet. Understandable since it was also the home of Schiller, Hölderlin, Mörike, Weiland, Uhland, Schlegel, Hegel, Schelling and Herman Hesse. Uhlman's name is not out of place among these, and the beauty of that birthplace illuminates every line of his stunning fictional memoir Reunion. He died in 1985.
