Robert Musil's Der Junge Törless (The Young Törless) is one of the most important books written in German in the 20th century. It was published before the First World War. I don't know anything about how the shortish novel was read then. During and after the Third Reich (which, when Austria was annexed in 1938 drove Musil into exile into Switzerland), it has been impossible to read it without thinking of how it prefigures both Nazi scapegoating and the German population's at least complicity with the systematic mistreatment (attempted annihilation) of unpopular minorities. In some ways, it is a universal story about not standing up to bullies, but with a more particular resonance to the success of the Austrian-born Adolf Hitler. (It is said that one of the triumphs of what me might now call "spinning" by the Viennese is to have made Beethoven (born in Bonn, Germany) Viennese and Hitler (born in Linz, Austria) German.)

The way that I read the novel during the mid-1970s is very close to the way director Volker Schlöndorff (The Tin Drum, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, Reversal of Fortune) read it. I knew that there was a 1966 movie adaptation (Schlöndorff's first feature film), but had been unable to see it until Criterion (bless them!) recently released a pristine-print DVD (with a very interesting discussion by Schlöndorff about the making of the movie).

Schlöndorff attended a Jesuit boarding school in France for three years in the 1950s, rather than a military boarding school in Austria before World War I. He was, therefore, personally familiar with the sociodynamics of such places. (On the commentary track, he says that the boarding school in which he shared a bench with future film-director Bernard Tavenier had not changed since Napoleonic times.) The adults tend to be either unaware of bullying or unconcerned about it.

The victim, conveniently alien (darker than the Aryans) Basini, is a show-off, with many debts. No longer able to borrow money from anyone, he steals some. Although not caught in the act, his guilt is intuited by Reiting (who Basini repays with money his friend Beineberg says he was robbed of during the night). Beineberg and Reiting decide not to turn Basini in for theft, but instead make him their slave (including using him as a sexual receptacle, though this is not directly shown), upping the torture in part because he does not feel the humiliation as they (and the somewhat priggish Törless, who is a nonparticipant observer of the escalating torture) feel that they should. Beineberg lectures Basini (after using him). Beineberg is the ideologue, Reiter an ordinary bully enjoying the torture, and Törless believes he has scientific detachment from what is going on.

Plot spoiler alert

When most everyone else goes away for a holiday break, Törless has a private talk with Basini, trying to find out how he can stand the degradations he is being put through. Basini explains that he is doing what he has to in his situation of obey or be turned in and expelled. Törless does not understand this (nor the basis for imaginary numbers...). He thinks that the other boys have gone too far, but discovers that by acquiescing to the extent of keeping silent (here, along with the banality of the evil-doers, is the resonance to Germans who had not opposed Hitler), he can no longer stop the escalating torture. He realizes that he is not innocent, having watched and not acted (going along to get along), and his complicity with evil makes him unable to stop its snowballing.

Finally, the schoolmasters discover that Basini is being tortured. Beineberg claims that he did not turn Basini in because he first wanted to try to reform him. The masters are happy to accept this explanation and do not expel the torturers, but are puzzled by Törless, who attempts tell them what he has learned about the lack of moral absolutes. This extended portrayal of incomprehension is the climax of the movie, though it has a cold anticlimax.

End of plot spoiler alert

Schlöndorff explains that he found the boys to play the cadets in discos, etc. except for Mathieu Carrière (the title character), the only one with previous acting experience, though it was his second movie (having played Tonio Kröger as a boy in Rolf Thiele's movie of the Thomas Mann novella, another movie I've wanted to see for a very long time, and also concerned with a too-detached observer. Carrière is perfect as the fastidious would-be engineer (Musil's own first profession) who analyzes himself into a corner. The part that Schlöndorff recalls that he had difficulty casting was Basini. The boys he had already cast suggested a classmate whom they considered a crybaby. Schlöndorff brought the boy (Marian Seidowsky) in for a test and thought he was perfect. However, he was from a Polish Jewish family that survived the Nazis, and Schlöndorff was afraid of the implications of casting a Jewish boy in the role of a victim who to a significant degree brought his mistreatment on himself. Seidowsky was a film buff and wanted to play the part and overcame Schlöndorff's misgivings.

The film provides no one with whom I would want to identify: a priggish morally compromised young intellectual who finds himself tumbling into the void, an uncomplicated bully, a protoneoconservative (and proto-Nazi) ideologue justifying torture, the heavily compromised victim, a cynical prostitute, and the oblivious masters unable to understand anything but neofascist rhetoric. The lack of any sympathetic character puts off some (in the book and in its screen adaptation). The black-and-white photography is also cold and crisp. The movie was shot in Austria on a very flat plain near the Hungarian border.

In addition to explaining the genesis of the movie (which launched the "New German Cinema" by winning the International Critics Prize at Cannes in 1966, after the cultural attaché from the German Federal Republic walked out of the screening decrying it as not representative of Germans or German films), Schlöndorff speaks briefly about what he asked Hans Werner Henze, probably the most important German composer of the second half of the 20th century for. The DVD provides an isolated score feature. Henze provided a sometimes eerie score (reminding me at times of the one Tori Takemitsu provided for "Woman in the Dunes" at about the same time).

As on the DVD of The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, Schlöndorff's bonus feature is fascinating and more than informative. It makes me all the more frustrated that the DVD of "The Ogre" (Schlöndorff's adaptation of the Prix Goncourt-winning novel by Michel Tournier set primarily in East Prussia) does not have one. Thanks to Criterion not only for making this significant movie available in an excellent print with an isolatable music track, but for eliciting the feature of/from Schlöndorff! (I was dissatisfied with Schlöndorff's Oscar-winning film of The Tin Drum. Since the Criterion edition of that has a commentary track by Schlöndorff and a memoir from him, I wonder if he could change my opinion of its relative failure. It also has a documentary on the movie's being banned as pornographic in the state that elected Tom Coburn to the US Senate recently.)


Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD