Book description
Kurt Gerber embarks hopefully on his last year at school, leading
to the all- important exam, but finds that he is constantly at odds
with the sadistic class teacher Professor Kupfer, known to his
students as Lord God Kupfer”, who particularly dislikes him. Inspired
partly by its author's own experience of his final school-leaving
examination, which he passed only at the second attempt, and partly by
the suicides of no less than ten school students in a single week in
the winter of 1929, Young Gerber is a timeless tale of classroom
angst, and an undisputed classic of Austrian literature.
"A perceptive - visionary insight into the panorama of our
existence" - Max Brod "[Kupfer] is magnificently conceived,
with a sizzling hate that burns through the pages - For many years I
have not held a book in my hands which expresses that - 'school-feeling'
as memorably as here - It is a living book." - Kurt Tucholsky
Friedrich Torberg (1908-1979) was a novelist, poet, essayist, sports
journalist, critic, translator and, briefly, a Hollywood screenwriter.
Born, like Franz Kafka, into a German-speaking Jewish family, Torberg
began his career in Vienna and Prague (where he also became a champion
water polo player). In 1938, facing Nazi persecution, he emigrated to
France and eventually to the US. Following a spell in Hollywood with
Bertold Brecht and Thomas Mann, Friedrich Torberg worked as a
journalist, theatre critic and translator in New York before returning
to Vienna in 1951. Having passed his final-year school exam only at the
second attempt, Torberg wrote his debut novel Young Gerber (Der Schuler
Gerber) at the startling age of 22; it marked his fiction debut, and was
championed by Max Brod and published by Paul Zsolnay in 1930. From 1951
until his death in 1979, he lived as a celebrated novelist, editor of
the anti-communist magazine 'FORVM' and translator (of Ephraim Kishon
amongst others). Later works by Torberg include the novels Aunt Jolesch
(Tante Jolesch), The Team (Die Mannschaft), Vienna Was that, Too (Auch
das War Wien, filmed by Wolfgang Gluck in 1986 and nominated for an
Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film), as well as poetry and
non-fiction. When he died, he was buried alongside Arthur Schnitzler in
Vienna's Central Cemetery.
