The emphasis on education in Unterm Rad makes achievement the novel’s foremost norm, which is demonstrated by an enormous pressure on Hans, the novel’s protagonist. Hans is granted an opportunity to study at Maulbronn, and his entire home village expects him to succeed.
Alongside the norm of achievement, the milieu portrayed in the novel conveys an ideal of conformity. Hans’s father is an apt representation of being “normal” and not “sticking out,” which we see in the novel’s first sentence: “Herr Joseph Giebenrath … had no special merits or peculiarities to distinguish him from his fellow citizens” (5). What Hans, in terms of principles, brings with him to boarding school is thus a contradiction. On the one hand, he is expected to succeed as a scholar, that is, distinguish himself; on the other hand, he is brought up by a stern single father (the mother is deceased) who cherishes moderation and conformity, a paradox that indicates inherent ambivalence in Unterm Rad which, we shall see, affects its protagonist.
The norm of achievement is upheld by most people in Hans’s life, not least his teachers. A teacher’s duty is to “subdue and extirpate untutored energy and natural appetites and plant in their place … quiet, temperate ideals” (50–51). In fact, Hans’s teachers regard all traces of the “wild, untamed, [and] uncultured” in students “a dangerous flame that must be extinguished and stamped out” (51). As we can see, education serves the purpose of breaking students down and subduing their individuality, specifically all forms of difference. To succeed, diligence is upheld as an absolute necessity. One should never be lazy, the school’s principal tells Hans: “Don’t relax your effort, otherwise you will fall under the wheel” (104).
The novel makes it evident that there are only two alternatives for a gifted boy like Hans, success or failure, which causes him anxiety. If he should not succeed “he would become one of the usual run of poor people whom he despised and wanted to outshine” (30). Therefore, he spends his entire summer holiday before boarding school studying intensely. His summer studies, however, give him headaches. His physical and emotional health quickly starts to deteriorate. The tutoring Hans receives from the town’s educated men is described as “walking along a flat country road; you moved forward, every day you grasped something you had failed to understand the previous day but you never reached mountain heights” (54). Hans begins to realize that for a model student the road to success has no summit.
As we shall see, the norm of achievement in
Unterm Rad is entangled with both stoic masculinity and heteronormativity. The heteronormativity permeating
Unterm Rad can be identified in its initial description of Hans’s hometown, where “marriages were respectable and frequently happy and the whole of life followed an incorrigibly old-fashioned pattern” (7). Returning home and achieving heterosexual happiness is a common trope in any
Bildungsroman (novel of formation), a genre
Unterm Rad belongs to. Franco Moretti explains that in a
Bildungsroman, normality is achieved through successful heterosexual marriages and the protagonist “either marries or, in one way or another, must leave social life.”
1Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987), 23. Hesse’s novels do not adhere to this directive, however. The protagonists seldom achieve heteronormative happiness in the end. Rather, as Ingo Cornils states, “Hesse’s heroes experience a similar development as do those of the traditional
Bildungsroman, with the vital difference that instead of going through a number of stages that educate them and allow them to find their places in society, they go on an ‘interior journey’ that brings them face to face with their ‘true’ selves.”
2Ingo Cornils, “Introduction: From Outsider to Global Player—Hermann Hesse in the Twenty-First Century,” in A Companion to the Works of Hermann Hesse, ed. Ingo Cornils (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009), 8. The endpoint for Hesse’s characters is always to “be themselves.”
Furthermore, Hans is brought up in a masculine environment where emotions are not acknowledged. When he passes his entrance exam for the boarding school (which is no small feat), his father, although clearly affected by the news, cannot bring himself to utter any words of praise: “He hardly knew what to say. He kept slapping his son on the back, laughed and shook his head. Then he opened his mouth to say something. But nothing came out and he just went on shaking his head” (32). The masculine environment with which Hans is accustomed also characterizes life at the boarding school. Tears, we understand, are taboo: “A number of the boys who were really on the point of tears assumed an expression of casual indifference and behaved as though they were not particularly concerned” (61). Acclimatizing oneself to boarding-school life implies conforming to its norm of stoic masculinity. The novel conveys that if one must cry, one should do so when no one is watching. In Hans’s dormitory the first night, he “caught an oddly frightened noise from the next bed but one; a boy was lying there, weeping with his sheet pulled over his head” (65).
The following sections will demonstrate that the features of Unterm Rad that contrast with the primary norms of the world of the novel strengthen its queer overtones.