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YoungTörless In May 1966, for the first time in the postwar era, West Germany had a real contender at the Cannes film festival. After two decades of mostly marginal and irrelevant film production, Germany had produced a work that made the festival audience sit up and take notice: Volker Schlöndorff’s Young Törless (Der junge Törless). FIPRESCI (Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinématographique ) awarded the film its international critics’ prize, and other awards soon followed. At home, Young Törless garnered three federal film prizes for the year’s best direction, script, and screenplay. In Nantes, France, during the European Film Days, the jury presented it with the Max Ophüls-Prize. In the United States, Variety praised it as “a very impressive directorial debut” (Hans 19). The 1967 International Film Guide listed Young Törless as one of the top ten films of the preceding year and referred to Schlöndorff as “the foremost hope of the new German cinema” (Cowie, 1967 5, 78). The film set up a pattern followed by dozens of subsequent works from the New German Cinema. It took a renowned literary text, assertively enacted it to strong cinematic effect, and dispassionately reflected on themes relevant to postwar West German culture: innocence and guilt, conformity and rebellion, solipsism and engagement. The movie evoked from spectators and critics a broad variety of interpretations. Some have analyzed Young Törless as a study of adolescence. Others debated whether the film proposed a political model of Middle European militarism. The film is effective on both counts. A viewer can best approach its psychological aspects by comparing the Törless film with the genre of literary and filmic narratives about adolescents and boarding schools that had preceded it. Similarly, an awareness of the way in which Schlöndorff’s literary contemporaries had reinterpreted Robert Musil’s novel makes clearer the motion picture’s metaphoric import for postwar Europe. The director translated to the screen, in convincing and inventive fashion, a classic of German-language fiction. During the 1950s and 1960s, West German critics and readers rediscovered Robert Musil’s 1906 novel, Die Verwirrungen des 3 25 Zöglings Törless, a work driven into intellectual exile when its author was forced to leave his country during the Third Reich. Ahighly subjective, modernist book that at first glance appears ill-suited for cinematic adaptation, the novel stands out as a work of experimental fiction. Its modernist self-consciousness questions the principles of nineteenth-century realism both through its psychological depth and its Sprachskepsis, a philosophical skepticism about the ability of language to articulate reality. The book relies on an omniscient, interpreting narrator to convey abstract ideas about its young protagonist. Schlöndorff omitted certain aspects of the novel’s intellectual quality when he undertook the adaptation. Contrary to John Sandford’s accusations in The New German Cinema, however, Schlöndorff did not make these changes out of facile reductionism, nor did he unambiguously simplify the novel by externalizing its depiction of characters’ internal states (37). Rather, our thesis is that the filmmaker’s choices complement the specificity of his medium: he created cinematic equivalents of Törless’s inner life and employed a network of leitmotifs to stimulate the viewer’s reflections. Both novel and film are set in a military academy in the eastern provinces of Austria. Törless’s experiences are at the center of the story. Sent by his father, Privy Councillor Törless, to obtain a first-rate education at this elitist institution , the student becomes involved in sadistic peer-group experimentation. Reiting and Beineberg, the student’s school friends, acquire complete control over a classmate when they gain knowledge of a break-in that he has committed . Törless witnesses the brutalities to which the pair subject the thief Basini in the boarding school’s attic, a space which the two, with a near-masochistic collaboration by their victim, have turned into a torture chamber. As the excesses against Basini increase and threaten to end with a class lynching, the victim admits his crime to the school authorities and is expelled. Törless leaves the academy of his own accord. In general, the film’s individual boarding school students follow the characterizations of the novel. Basini (Marian Seidowsky) is the sensitive one. Because of his immaturity and inferiority complex, he is a show-off, an endangered , sometimes feminine adolescent who commits an act of theft. Reiting (Alfred Dietz...

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