Fred Uhlman (1901 – 1985) was primarily an artist. I don’t know if the picture is a self-portrait. I don’t think it’s his style.
He wrote an autobiography, The Making of an Englishman, in 1960 and a novella, Reunion, in 1971. The latter was republished in 1977 with an Introduction by Arthur Koestler that expresses his admiration for the style and content of Reunion more elegantly and with greater authority than I can aspire to.
“When I first read Fred Uhlman’s Reunion some years ago, I wrote to the author (whom I only knew by reputation as a painter) that I considered it a minor masterpiece. The qualifying adjective needs perhaps a word of explanation. It was meant to refer to the small size of the book, and to the impression that although its theme was the ugliest tragedy in man’s history, it was written in a nostalgic minor key.
By its format, Reunion is neither a novel nor a short story, but a novella, an art form more appreciated on the Continent than here. It lacks the bulk and panoramic quality of the novel, but it is not a short story either, because the latter generally deals with an episode, a fragment of life, whereas the novella aspires to be something more complete – a novel in miniature. In this respect Fred Uhlman succeeds admirably – perhaps because painters know how to adapt composition to the size of the canvas, whereas writers, unfortunately, have an unlimited supply of paper.
He also succeeds in lending his narrative a musical quality which is both haunting and lyrical. ‘My wounds,’ his hero, Hans Schwarz, writes, ‘have not healed, and to be reminded of Germany is to have salt rubbed into them.’ Yet his memories are suffused with yearning for ‘the soft, serene bluish hills of Swabia, covered with vineyards and crowned with castles,’ and for ‘the Black Forest where the dark woods, smelling of mushrooms and the tears of amber-coloured mastic, were threaded through by trout streams with sawmills on their banks.’ He is hounded out of Germany, his parents are driven to suicide, and yet the after-taste of the novella which lingers on is the fragrance of local wine in dark-timbered inns on the banks of Neckar and Rhine. There is none of the Wagnerian fury; it is as if Mozart had re-written the Götterdämmerung.
Hundreds of bulky tomes have now been written about the age when corpses were melted into soap to keep the master-race clean; yet I sincerely believe that this slim volume will find its lasting place on the shelves. London, June 1976. “
Arthur Koestler’s appreciation of Uhlman’s masterpiece is elegant, accurate and evokes the magic of Uhlman’s writing. Another reviewer crassly and insensitively wrote that Reunion can be read in the time it takes to down two Dry Martinis.
