Semper der Jüngling

A sixteen-year-old student accepts a position observing primary-school classes and confronts the first duties and responsibilities of adult life. Intimate family scenes portray modest household routines and the parents' mixture of pride and nostalgia when his appointment rekindles hopes deferred by hardship. At the school he listens to lessons, records absences and tardiness, and discovers that practical tasks complicate his idealized notions of education. Private reflections and literary allusions accompany a striving to grasp what holds the world together, mixing philosophical yearning with youthful exuberance. The book assembles episodic classroom vignettes, neighborhood and home portraiture, and inward psychological observation to trace a gradual formation of character.