Alfred Wellm (1927–2001)

This, Wellm's first novel for adults, became the classic DDR novel about teachers and the school system. Wellm's central character, Gustav Wanzka, is a man who went into teaching full of the reformist ideas of the 1920s, was excluded from the profession by the Nazis, and returned to become an education official under the DDR. After a long period as District Education Director, he has asked to be transferred back to classroom teaching for his last few years before retirement, and is assigned to a primary school in a small town in Mecklenburg.

Back in Weimar times, Wanzka identified one of the working-class children he was teaching as a prodigious mathematical talent and tried to put him into a position to do something with his gifts. Largely due to his own conflict with the Nazi authorities, he failed in his attempts to help the boy, who didn't get to study, was drafted into the ranks and wastefully killed in the war. Now he seems to have spotted another talented boy, Norbert, and his focus on this one student brings him into conflict with his fellow-teachers in the school.

At one level you can read this as simply a satire of small-town clubbiness, the mediocrity and laziness of teachers and all the rest of it. There's a timid headmaster, a scheming and politically astute deputy head, a discipline-obsessed sports teacher, an idealistic young woman, an infuriatingly well-travelled English-teacher, a biologist who yawns all the time and has exclusive rights to the comfy chair, a woolly middle-aged matron who is always going on about her brother-in-law in the West and his Mercedes, and the entire staff-room is obsessed with angling and the annual staff picnic on the lake. Like Wellm, Wanzka comes from a family of professional fishermen and has nothing but contempt for recreational anglers. Wanzka's only real friend on the staff is Pikors, the resourceful caretaker.

But it's also a more serious challenge to received ideas about what education is for: should schools be focussed on the needs of society as a whole — efficient, smooth-running skill-factories for producing good citizens — or should they be more child-centred, as Wanzka would like, places where learning can be fun and children can develop their own gifts and interests in an atmosphere free from the tyranny of tests and schedules? Clearly that's not a question confined to the DDR, or indeed a question that can ever have a clear answer one way or the other. Wellm seems to be mostly on Wanzka's side, but he makes it clear that things aren't quite straightforward. We're never quite sure (except in the "happy-ending" bolted on to the story out of political expediency) that Wanzka's conviction of the importance of Norbert's talents isn't based on self-deception, and we do see quite clearly that his extra work with Norbert leads to neglect of other responsibilities and problems for Wanzka's colleagues.

We might add, from our 21st century perspective, that both Wanzka and Wellm seem to suffer from an inability to notice the female half of the student body: almost all the named children in the book are boys. There's a Sieglinde who is asked to write on the blackboard, but we don't learn any more about her than that, and another younger girl whom Wanzka calls "the dancer".

Wellm started writing this book in the relatively open political climate of the early sixties, but by the time it was submitted for publication in 1967, things had changed, and there was a long and bitter struggle before it could be published. Typically for the DDR, the question went right up to the top, and it was Walter Ulbricht himself who gave the go-ahead — allegedly to spite education minister Margot Honecker, who was vehemently opposed to the book coming out. There was a lot of controversy about the book when it appeared in 1968: teachers' organisations resented the negative portrayal of their profession, ideologists felt that its message was too individualistic for a socialist society, and so on. Various plans for a film version got nowhere: one was eventually made only in 1990. But the book soon established itself as a classic of DDR literature, with over a quarter of a million copies sold (to a population of around 15 million!).… (altro)