Heinrich Mann’s Small Town Tyrant: The Grammar School Novel as a German Prototype of Academic Fiction

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Abstract

This article considers the German Grammar School Novel from the first half of the twentieth century an all but forgotten Germanophone prototype of campus fiction. Whereas the Anglo-American campus novel of the 1970s, 80s and 90s features university professors as future-related agents of Western counterculture and free thought, the Grammar School Novel satirizes the German grammar school teacher known as Gymnasialprofessor as a representative of the past-related order of the autocratic German state apparatus from the beginning of the twentieth century. As Heinrich Mann's 1905 novel Professor Unrat / Small Town Tyrant (the source text of Marlene Dietrich's debut movie The Blue Angel) may be considered a foundational work of the German Grammar School Novel corpus, the main part of the article offers a sample analysis of this text.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)63-71
Number of pages9
JournalActa Neophilologica
Volume49
Issue number1-2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2016

Austrian Fields of Science 2012

  • 602008 English studies
  • 602053 Comparative literature studies
  • 602014 German studies

Keywords

  • Anglo-American Campus Novel
  • German Grammar School Novel
  • Heinrich Mann
  • The Blue Angel
  • Marlene Dietrich

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