This plays reveals a common theme at the time, the enslavement of young people in Germany within their boarding schools. Törless is the most famous victim of this environment. But here we are dealing with Moritz and Melchior, proving that M&M's is not the best of medicine in life. This total control of the young people's life that has only one objective, to study, to learn Latin and translate Greek, goes along with an absolute desexualization of their psyche in the name of an extreme puritan vision of ethics and life. This causes a depressive existential vision in these teenagers who look for some satisfaction anyway they can, some erotic information and literature, some friendship among themselves as a surrogate of the love they need and are deprived of, even banging up the first girl they find on their road and who knows nothing about love or rather intercourse. This produces a drama, of course. One fourteen year old boy, Moritz, commits suicide in his boarding school that expels his best friend, Melchior, who had passed some information about the physical activities they are all dreaming of, and had impregnated a certain Wendla who will die of an overdose of an abortive drug given to her by her own mother. This sexual information is considered as the unethical trigger of the suicide. Melchior's family then decides to send him to a house of correction where he discovers real evil and convinces himself he is the most guilty human being in the world. He is then tempted by crime or, because of some remnant of ethics, by suicide to put away his good for nothing person. This dilemma is set up on the stage after Melchior's escape from the house of correction in the last scenes in the graveyard where the suicidee Moritz is buried. Melchior is thus, then and there tempted to join his departed friend Moritz who is reaching out for him. But life is stronger and it comes embodied in an unidentified man who steps in and explains to Melchior that life is a long road that can provide all kinds of surprises that death cannot. This play is the matrix of many other plays and films, the most famous film being the Dead Poets' Society. But this play recently found in France its perfect illustration and re-enactment in French teenagers' prisons with several suicides resulting from total negligence if not unethical mistakes from the personnel who considered - and probably still considers - speaking of suicide was some kind of blackmail from the kids, even if they were depressive which was another way of blackmailing the personnel, wasn't it, and some kind of humorous joke to be used as a torturing device by the personnel to satisfy their sadistic and revengeful perversion onto the kids they are supposed to educate to some fair social life. Nothing has changed under the sun, or under the moon as for that. Not even the fate of young people when their society forgets they are human, forgets it takes a whole village to educate one young child, forgets they have to love people if they want to really educate and reform them. But love is the only thing thatis not available in the pedagogical and "professional" minds of these people who are called prison wardens and other personnel.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine, University of Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University of Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines.