Role in The Hiss Case
In 1929, Whittaker Chambers translated Der Abituriententag from German, published in English as Class Reunion.
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.
Read more about this topic: Class Reunion (1928 Novel)
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