The Flying Classroom
The flying classroom is a school novel for children by the German writer Erich Kästner from 1933 .
action
The novel begins with a framework story in which the author, Erich Kästner himself, appears as a character. The first chapters describe how he decides to write a Christmas story on his summer vacation in Grainau, Upper Bavaria: This novel is supposed to be about high school students at an Upper Bavarian boarding school shortly before the Christmas holidays. The main characters are five boarding school friends who are friends with their play The flying classroom for the approaching Christmas partyrehearse and experience the pre-Christmas season in different ways. These are the class leader Martin Thaler, conscientious and a justice fanatic who cannot go home for Christmas due to the poverty of his parents; the silent and introverted Jonathan "Johnny "lik, abandoned by his birth parents, who spends Christmas at boarding school because his adoptive father is an overseas captain; Matthias Selbmann, physically strong, thick-skinned and good-natured, who is looking forward to the punching ball he is supposed to get for Christmas because he is emulating Max Schmeling ; Ulrich "Uli" von Simmern, sensitive and timid, who wants to prove before Christmas that he is not a coward, and the intelligent and complicated Sebastian Frank, who actually considers Christmas and mutual gifts to be pointless, but still adheres to tradition want. In addition, as adults, Dr. Johann "Justus" (the Righteous) Bökh, the house tutor of the boarding school, who is admired by all, as well as the "non-smoker", apparently a friendly occasional pianist who lives in a discarded non-smoking wagon of the Reichsbahn.
The story consists of individual episodes. First, a classmate, the teacher’s child Rudi Kreuzkamm, the son of the German teacher, along with the dictation books from his father’s class is kidnapped by students from the traditionally hostile secondary school and held captive in a cellar. A snowball fight between the two schools threatens. The non-smoker suggests that the strongest high school student (a boy named Heinrich Wawerka) fight against the strongest high school student (Matthias Selbmann, called Matz), and the winner of the fight should also be the winner of the school war. Matz wins the fight, but the secondary school students break their word and do not release the prisoner. The five high school students have to use force to free their comrade, but discover that the dictation books have been burned in front of the prisoner Rudi Kreuzkamm. The children are strictly interrogated by their tutor, Dr. Bökh, who shows understanding for their unauthorized “exit” and therefore waives a draconian punishment because he admires the moral courage of the children.
Other episodes include rehearsals for the play entitled The Flying Classroom , which is due to be performed before Christmas; then Uli's desperate proof of his courage when he leaps from a climbing frame with an umbrella in hand and breaks his leg; then the reunification of Dr. Bökhs with his long-lost friend, a former doctor, called "non-smoker"; Martin Thaler's Christmas drive home to his destitute parents after Dr. Bökh Martin gave the travel money.
At the end, the framework is taken up again and the author tells how he met Johnny Jetzt and his adoptive father two years later in Berlin (in the first film adaptation in the Munich Hofgarten). All of his comrades and he have become independent personalities, all courageous and cheerful in their own way. Remarkably, Uli is now the most assertive of them all.
After the Olympic Winter Games in 1936 , Kästner wrote a short story as a sequel under the title: Two students have disappeared . In this short story, the Tertians Matthias and Uli tear out of the boarding school in Kirchberg for Garmisch-Partenkirchen to watch the Winter Games. They make friends with an English ice hockey player.
reception
In 2003, Katharina Döbler emphasized that Kästner's 70-year-old children's book was suitable for outlasting times and epochs because the basic problems it addressed were not tied to the time. The "ugly basic experiences of childhood" such as the abandonment that Johnny Spy experienced as a toddler, the desperate desire for recognition that led little Uli von Simmern to his dangerous test of courage and the limitations of poverty that Martin Thaler and his family had to deal with , there still exist. Döbler praises the building of a bulwark of friendship against such bitterness and sees the book as an educational alternative that is utopian and moralistic, but still valid. Nevertheless, she does not consider the book as a whole to be timeless, but rather clearly points out that the children's novel bears the stamp of its time: “Right fought against left and left against right, and everyone for economic survival. You can tell from the book: the creaking, the strict hierarchies, the cult of male fighting and camaraderie rituals. It was published in 1933. "This bothered her even in her childhood, but:" Readers have their protective mechanisms. When things are strange, they look and read somewhere else, to the familiar, to the exciting, to the moving. And there are plenty of them in the flying classroom. "
Film adaptations
The flying classroom was filmed three times. The flying classroom (1954) adheres most closely to the novel. Here Erich Kästner appears as himself and narrator.
In the second film adaptation, The Flying Classroom (1973) , the prehistory in which Erich Kästner tells how he wrote the novel The Flying Classroom was dispensed with. Otherwise only very slight adjustments were made to the changed living conditions of the 1970s. However, the plot, which takes place in winter in the novel, has been moved to summer and the ending has been greatly changed - in the film, the entire school class flies to Nairobi at the end , making the flying classroom a reality.
The biggest changes to the original story then took place in The Flying Classroom (2003) . The mass beating scenes described in great detail in the book are largely dispensed with. The main roles (identification figures) are portrayed as peace-loving pupils who suffer from attacks by the “external” (classmates who do not live in the boarding school). The attacks of the external classmates were reinterpreted as contemporary topics such as "school bullying". In addition, the events will be moved from a normal boarding school to the boarding school of the Thomanerchor Leipzig .
literature
- Alwin Binder : Speechless Freedom? On communication behavior in Erich Kästner's "The Flying Classroom" . In: Discussion German . 53, 1980. pp. 290-306.
- Susanne Haywood: Children's literature as a contemporary document. Everyday normality of the Weimar Republic in Erich Kästner's children's novels (= children's and youth culture, literature and media. Theory - history - didactics. Volume 1.). Lang, Frankfurt am Main a. a. 1998, ISBN 3-631-33735-3 (Dissertation University of Western Australia Perth, 1998, 235 pages).
- Klaus Johann: Limit and stop. The individual in the “House of Rules”. On German-language boarding school literature (= contributions to recent literary history , volume 201). Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg 2003, ISBN 3-8253-1599-1 , (dissertation Uni Münster 2002, 727 pages).
- Ruth Klüger : Corrupt Morality: Erich Kästner's children's books. In: Ruth Klüger: Women read differently . Essays. 3rd edition, dtv 12276 Munich 1997 pp. 63-82.
- Ingo Tornow : Erich Kästner and the film . dtv, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-423-12611-6 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Erich Kästner's own genre designation: The flying classroom. A novel for children Cecilie Dressler, Berlin undated (1954), title page.
- ↑ Kästner for children , Gutenberg Book Guild , licensed edition by Atrium Verlag Zurich 1985, ISBN 3-7632-3109-9 , Volume 2, pp. 649–670.
- ↑ Review note on www.perlentaucher.de
- ↑ Katharina Döbler, A non-smoker for everyone , in: Die Zeit , May 22, 2003 ( online ( memento of the original from October 27, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and Archive link according to instructions and then remove this note. )
- ^ The flying classroom Summary of the film on the Seitz Filmproduktion website
