Comrades, Friends and Companions: Utopian Projections and Social Action in German Literature for Young People 1926-1934

Comrades, Friends and Companions provides the first critical analysis of classic German novels for young people of the late Weimar Republic. The author reveals how purportedly realistic portrayals of youth in groups projected a better world in the years of social and political crisis. These alternative realities in the German adolescent novel of the time evince the pedagogical and ideological struggles that were endemic in Weimar Culture. This study also confronts the early work of Erich Kaestner and his restructuring of authority in the Enlightenment pattern of the model child.