2023-08-28 11:22:26
Literature “Unterm Rad” by Hesse
The end goal of the school is always the subject
Status: 31.08.2023 | Reading time: 3 minutes
Hermann Hesse (1877-1962)
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It doesn’t always have to be a cane. Hermann Hesse’s novel “Unterm Rad” shows that even well-meaning teachers can destroy a student – without a beating. For almost 120 years, young people have recognized themselves in the fate of the main character. Also in the new school year.
Around 1900 school became a problem in literature. Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann and Robert Musil suddenly addressed the devastation that school wreaks on the souls of young people. School horror prose such as “The Confusions of the Pupil Törless”, “Unterm Rad”, the episodes with the godlike strict director Wulicke in Thomas Mann’s “Buddenbrooks” or Friedrich Torberg’s “Der Schüler Gerber” were paradoxically a consequence of the great, well-intentioned reforms and modernizations of the education.
If in Hesse’s novel “Unterm Rad” from 1906 the gifted student Hans Giebenrath drowns at the end, it is not because he encountered sadists at school, but precisely because his many sponsors – from the rector of the Latin school to the town priest through to the teachers in the legendary Swabian seminary in Maulbronn – who perhaps meant a bit too well and encouraged and challenged him too much. His “hypertrophy of intelligence at the onset of degeneration” is not up to it.
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When going to school was a matter of course and literacy rates were higher than they are today, the downside of the system was suddenly discovered. The dark-toned school novel became the literary genre of the time. The ideological background of such criticism of the system was the life reform movement, which strived to free people from all corsets. An authoritarian system is described, the purpose of which was to turn students into subjects.
When the children in many federal states return after the holidays or start school again, they may complain a little. But compared to what “Unterm Rad” describes, a fundamental change has taken place, at least superficially. Hesse summarizes the views of the time quite aptly: “Just as a jungle must be cleared and cleaned and forcibly restricted, so the school must break down, conquer and forcibly restrict the natural man; Their task is to make him a useful member of society according to principles approved by the authorities and to awaken qualities in him, the full development of which then crowns the careful discipline of the barracks.” Even today, no teacher would say that anymore.
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Nevertheless, the book still appeals to young people 118 years later. They recognize their own in Hans Giebenrath’s discomfort. Why? On the one hand, because Hans’ mental turbulence is an eternal phenomenon of puberty: many parents who don’t understand you, but who you still want to be proud of, have many. And torn between childhood freedom and the desire to grow up (which in the book the “you” stands for in the seminar) some are still. On the other hand, the state still prepares its citizens at school the way it needs them. Sensitive youngsters feel that the “responsible citizen” is just a modernized version of the subject.
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