Description

This novel is set in the city of Prague. The story commences in the year 1927, which is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the graduation of the Class of 1902 from the most famous and advanced higher school in the city, named the Stephansgymnasium.

Many of the characters in this story are thinly disguised portraits of real people. At the time of publication in 1928, the book caused a public furore not only because of its relentless  analyses of personalities, of psychologies, and of motives, but because many of the people in the story were widely recognised as specific individuals. The others were equally recognisable types familiar to everyone who had ever attended a boys’ school.

After publishing this devastating story, there was no way that anyone of the German language reading public could say they had not heard of the notorious Franz Werfel.

Reviews at the time of original publication in Germany:

‘CLASS REUNION is a significant, a tense, and a
profound book which proves the author is one of
the purest and most artistic figures of the younger
generation.’
-Essener Allgemeine Zeitung

‘Werfel’s new novel seems to me to be his most
beautiful, his most humane, and his most responsible
book; it is a work of poetry.’
-Hamburger Fremdenblatt

‘This is the best of all the recent books. In Werfel
are a demoniac quality and virtuosity, a restlessness,
a continuous ascent, a visionary power which deprive
us of our breath. One reads the book without
stopping; one is torn out of one’s self.’
-Literarische Welt, Berlin

‘CLASS REUNION is told quite simply, and yet
it is profoundly rooted in the spirit, and it rises
passionately into the sphere of the universal.
The reader of this tale will be deeply moved by
Werfel’s creative power which enables him to create
human beings in their most delicate reactions and
in cognizance of the most secret corners of their
consciousness. Not only the mere course of the
story, but the artistry of the presentation rises in
interest to the magnificent climax where individual
fate is conducted to that region where the human,
the ethical, and the religious are one.’
-Acht Uhr Blatt, Berlin