The model students
Die Musterschüler is a novel by the Vorarlberg writer Michael Köhlmeier , published in 1989 by Piper Verlag, Munich. The psychological study of the novel is a parable about the emergence of community violence and, like the novel Die Welle, describes the alleged peer pressure , the latent readiness for violence and the topic of guilt, forgetting, repression and glossing over events that were long past in 1963.
The impressive school history is dealt with in dialogue form in a kind of interview with constant interim questions between two people who remain unknown to the reader, whereby the person questioned is one of the fourteen-year-olds who worked twenty-five years ago, who was responsible for coming to terms with all those involved, provided he was able to determine their whereabouts. had visited. The name of the narrator is never mentioned and thus remains unknown - in contrast to all other actors.
action
In a Catholic boarding school for boys in Vorarlberg with strict rules, led by monks , the students are taught in the local grammar school . You attend this school together with local students, driving students, boys from another, even stricter Catholic home, as well as from an elegant, expensive home. Girls are also taught in parallel classes.
The students of the lower three high school classes are together in a dormitory, always supervised by a dormitory capo from one of the higher classes who changes regularly. As an aside, it is mentioned that this youthful overseer treats the boys very differently - the nicest of them reads to the little ones, the worst of them abuses them individually for sexual games.
In order to be able to go home for a short weekend break, you first have to tackle the hurdle of a Latin exam, which the prefect sets up the day before.
For the third grade, Gebhard Malin is in, the holidays are canceled - due to a stupid little prank that the entire class has to pay for: On the eve of the Latin exam, the prefect plays the flute for the students in the lower three grades and they have to Describe his game with the best possible turned words. The one in the class who succeeds in doing this would be the first to take the exam the next day and can therefore be the first to pack and go home to the parents. The third graders now come up with the stupid idea that class clown Ferdi Turner should fart .
Such things can sometimes end well and amuse the very capricious Prefect, who is not averse to alcohol. On this evening, however, the stupid prank went totally wrong. He takes it as a bad criticism of his flute playing and does not examine it at all the next day.
They can only iron out the crime for good by completing three weeks of strict Latin study in the home, without an outcome and for the most part without saying a word. Three weeks later, a Latin exam is announced in high school. Then the collective punishment should be lifted.
After the Saturday exam, everyone seems to be in good spirits, at least it seems so and a week later, after the graded school workbooks have been distributed, they find that six of the seven third graders have a very good , three of them even with a comment and only Gebhard , the above-average Latin student, strangely has a straight five . He was the last to submit and still only answered a few of the questions asked.
After dinner, the prefect called all seven of them into the study after looking through the notebooks and announced to those expecting a reward that none of them would be allowed to go home or have a visit until Christmas , and that the meal had been canceled for the next day, she would have additional would have to complete further rigorous studies in Latin. Furthermore, they have to prove that they are a community after all . According to the ex-student or narrator interviewed throughout the book, whose name is the only one not known, he says: "Chastise him" to the boys. Despite his severity and harshness and sometimes strange games, he had never said anything like this before. The boys' discussion about the punishment or non-punishment for Gebhard (as is initially argued in part ) lasts the whole afternoon and the mood is more and more agitated and irritated, misunderstandings arise and nobody wants to lose face in front of the others and as Cowards and slackers stand there. Gebhard receives the final sentence in the form of class beating for countless little things - arrogant behavior, jealousy because of a girl, etc. Your victim Gebhard Malin then throws them into the window shaft, which is located near the basement window, next to the lower study room and pours sand on him the face so as not to see it anymore.
Later on, the overwhelmed head of the home, the rector , told the health insurance company that Malin fell unhappily down the stairs. The rector, who is only too happy to give the red wine, is overwhelmed by the whole affair, as always. The class representative of the Seven, Manfred Fritsch, learned his testimony from Malin's friend, the Hungarian Arpad Csepella, who fled to Vienna in 1956. The fourth grader Csepella could not come to the help of Gebhard Malin because he himself had been in the infirmary of the home that weekend.
Gebhard is so badly injured that the first question is whether he will ever get well again - and whether he will ever be able to speak again. He is only visited in the hospital by Arpad Csepella and his girlfriend Veronika, a sixteen-year-old waitress in a café, with whom Franz Brandl and the narrator are both in love and because of the hostile rivalry between the two . He is also not visited by any of the three monks in the home.
25 years later, the class is asked by the narrator how Gebhard Malin's cruel brawl came about at the time, and he then describes it to an unknown person who questions or interrogates him in this regard. In the last two years after his divorce he had visited the other classmates - with the exception of Gebhard - and had talked to each of them at least once about the time.
Nobody knows exactly who started it anymore. Each of the adults now belittles his own guilt, or even claims, like Edwin Tiefentaler, the mayor's son and now, thanks to his good marriage, well-appointed tax consultants , that he can no longer remember or can hardly remember it. Nobody wanted to have been the ringleader back then .
Even the narrator tries to wash himself clean. During the deliberations at the time regarding the punishment - whether it should be just a fool around or they just pretend that they had beaten him etc. - a call would have come for him and he would have been at the doorman and telephoned his aunt, who was visiting his parents and they asked if he could go home, since she would like to see him, and when he came back to the study it was all already decided.
In between, the narrator keeps wandering off the action, telling stories from all of her childhood in boarding school, his first love, little secrets and lies ...
A few of the former classmates had met in Malin's hometown - at the request and organization of Lässer, the person who was the first to go for real beating and was called the “angel” at the time because of his blond curls and his delicate, innocent appearance; However, his family was no longer resident here and their parents' house has since been converted into a hotel.
After his hospital stay, Gebhard was only in the home until the Christmas holidays. Gebhard's parents were visited by the principal that the boy was unbearable for the home, an imposition for the other students. Arpad, who had come to this boarding school from social welfare , was picked up by his uncle, whose first question was who the boy had killed. The two boys never came back after the Christmas break.
None of those involved is aware of the whereabouts of Veronika Tobler, Gebhard Malin and Csepella Arpad. The narrator once asked about Veronika in the café where she had worked, but no one could or would not give him an answer as to where she had gone.
After the narrator finds out by chance on the day of the "deed" that the three of them want to travel to South America , he later suspects that they may have done it too.
Remarks
The structure in dialogue form gives the impression of being in the same room as the two communicating people.
The book asks the question of when and why and in what form the parties involved gloss over whether there is such a thing as partial guilt. In addition, whether each of the actors is equally guilty of what happened. Subsequently, it also emerges whether there can be an excuse for crimes at all, whether everything can be forgiven when the perpetrator or perpetrators show remorse and regret, and confess guilty.
Bibliographical information
- Michael Köhlmeier: The model students . Piper, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-492-03370-9 . (Paperback edition 2009 by dtv, ISBN 978-3-423-13800-0 .)